A to J: The Wandering Jew

ABDUCTION

Travel, they said. Take a break, seek beguilement, get out and about. When I say they, I mean it only in a generic sense because I didn’t tell anyone about what had happened. And I mean it only in the sense that this was the prevailing wisdom of the time, if one can call it that; go abroad, seek out sights, find distraction.

Why didn’t I confide in someone?

I’m a private, some may even say, diffident man. Spilling the miscarried contents of my guts to office monkeys is not my style. And then there’s the thing about men of my age. We tend to have associates and colleagues but no particular friends. Not ones anyway that could be counted as close. It was also a matter of pride. You don’t go around telling all and sundry that your wife of two and a bit years has been balling silly the guy next door and run off into the night without so much as a backward glance.

Both my parents are dead. I have a sister, Ruth, who lives across state; West Coast, California. We seldom connect apart from the odd email. I didn’t even tell her. She has her life. And I didn’t want to sound like a loser Jew. A schlemiel, as my mother would say. There was no one else I was close enough to, to share this shit with. I had a cousin who was a buddy, but he was killed when the towers came down. Bloody Arabs.

My first reaction to the change of fortune was to find a smaller apartment some distance away from the ill-fated love nest. No one wants to come home each night to stare at reminders of rampant sex from the angled vantage of a bedroom doorway. So I found cheaper lodgings on the lower East Side, Manhattan, three stories up.

For a time, maybe a month or so, I tramped the streets of an evening, head down into the guttering wind, like Greta Garbo only with less chic. It was an aimless, automatist thing, a contrivance to put me into a trance, help work off bitterness, anger, the attendant grief. I was also doing my best to tire myself out in order to provide some catatonic and careless sleep. Exhaustion seemed the best trick at the time. I increased my hours of work, putting in overtime at the office of Zellsnick and Co, the architectural firm where I’ve been practicing for the past ten years. I’m thirty-three years old, a number that holds in certain circles some allegorical significance. I won’t go into that now.

I knew a man once who was so schmuck lonely he wandered the streets at night just to be around people. Strangers, moving bodies, it didn’t matter. Simply to be in their general vicinity was enough, like a surrogate family. People on sidewalks, body heat, faces, movement, noises and warmth. Disconnection is the prevailing disease of our time.

On Sundays I became a regular at the Met. On the way through Central Park, I made friends with the squirrels. I took to carrying pieces of cake in my pocket to feed the furry creatures. Animals for friends, food as bait. Pathetic really. In the end we’re all brute creatures looking for comfort.

One day, about three months later, I spotted this stunning Greek vase at the gallery. Red figure, it said on the label, 480 BC, a wine drinking cup, on loan from the German collection. It wasn’t just the vase but the image on the surface of the thing that caught my attention. Painted in a frieze on the smooth clay surface were the fabled figures of Helen and Paris, the latter leading her away from Sparta to the battlements of Troy. Leading his prize by the wrist, I noted, suggesting perhaps a degree of reluctance on the woman’s part. Was she an unwilling participant in this famous historic seduction? No such reticence in my particular case, I recalled. Nevertheless, it was finely done. The sexual connotations were subtly suggested by the woman’s sheer dress. I looked at the vase for a long time.

The next day I found myself flicking through the glossy brochures at the local travel department.

ABSOLUTE

Florence looked likely in summer. In the shots anyway. I presumed it was summer. Here, it was snowing outside. I heated some soup.

In the end I had to notify work of my change of address. In doing so I must have inadvertently mentioned to someone the state of affairs that had prompted the shift. It caused no ripple. These things happen with monotonous frequency these days. It’s almost de rigueur in the modern age. Infidelity; it’s common as cancer or heart attack in the West. I wondered about that for a while, trying to find any correlation? I came to no firm conclusion. We’re living at a time where all that’s categorical and certain is spent. No stake in the ground, line in the sand, rock of ages. Some say it’s a good thing, breeding tolerance and inclusion. Others, the slippery slope. It was as far as I took it. A sign of the times, I heard one frothing street preacher call out as I passed in the snow on my evening tramp. Fornication and lusts of the flesh, he cried in the frozen air, puffing balls of frosty smoke from his mouth while holding forth in competition with the clamorous traffic. America was the great whore, he yelled with a bark in his throat. No one listened. Where were they, all these whores? I never had the pleasure.

As the days and nights wore on, I saw him out there in the same spot, a ragged, disheveled figure, buttoned up and stooped against a grubby wall, not too far from the ruined Towers. He could have passed for some panhandler, one of those hapless creatures sleeping in cardboard at night. I always had ambivalent feelings about these grubbers. If I was so fucking poor, New York would be the last place I’d be scratching a living. I’d be living in Tupelo or somewhere; somewhere cheaper and the people more friendly. I always ignored the tin rattlers. I felt sorry and didn’t. You’re just perpetuating your situation, I said each time I passed their piled boxes and bundle of rags. It’s heart on the sleeve stuff. Conspicuous poverty. The same as Rockefeller only the other way round. Hitch a ride to Arkansas.

Anyway, this preacher type with his woolly hat and mangy grey coat started to get to me, spitting his venom through broken teeth. Perhaps it kept him warm, all that anger and pious vitriol. It was ironic, given my situation, I suppose, but there are greater sins than sexual duplicity. In my more generous moods, I knew Dante was right to dump them into the top rungs of hell, the level of least alarming misconduct. These things happen. We’re all hard-ass infidels now. The poet, of course, had sublimated his desires in the best thirteenth century chivalrous fashion. I’d studied the text as a sophomore at Yale. Courtly love fused with breathless mysticism. An affected contrivance. We’re well past that. Mores the pity, some might say.

At one stage I’d tried to analyze what it was that was making my own case so especially upsetting: vanity, wounded pride, rejection, an affront to one’s high self- worth? It was some of these things. I was certainly pissed off, but not enough to gather an Old Testament stoning posse together. That’s the trouble with our Middle Eastern heritage. It was hard for me to recognize this at first, being a Jew. But it has to be said. There’s an incipient violence and even a perverted value system at the heart of my own cultural background. Perhaps that’s why my father finally had done with it. Put away his yarmulke and cut off his beard. Still, living in this age is not easy what with the sign posts gone and walls torn down.

When I’d caught her out, Judith my ex, she’d turned on me with the old mismatch trick. This was her first line of defense. What kind of a bitching little ploy is that? We’d had our ration of conflict, but hardly enough to warrant bonking some gigolo down the hall. What got me the most was there seemed to be no demonstrable shame attached to her retort. No expression of regret or honest apology. Several years of life, energy and intimacy dismissed with a wave of the hand. There’s no quick healing in a reply like that. Judith, the ball-breaker. I think there’s a biblical character with the same name. I could be wrong. I asked at the time for the nub of the matter. I didn’t respect her, apparently. That was news to me and rather rich, I thought, given my recent discovery. But incredulous as I was, I enquired further and it turned out I didn’t listen to her. What that meant on examination was I disagreed with her. Since when was disagreeing a mark of disrespect? But things were too far gone by that stage. It was a convoluted logic, founded on various minor incidents made to bear the weight of things it never was built for. At one stage she pulled her mother’s observations into the picture. I was on a hiding to nothing.

I poured over my brochures but procrastinated.

I was on the point of making a decision a couple of weeks later, when I bumped into a woman on the same floor as myself, just three doors down from me. She was having trouble with the key. It seemed to have jammed in the lock so I offered to help. I worked on it for a minute and eventually got the door open. She was a small dark-eyed pretty thing with a five year old kid at her side who stared at me suspiciously. I’d not seen them before so I figured they were new to the building. When the same thing happened a couple of days later, she invited me in for a coffee by way of thanks. The place had a noticeable sweet yet slightly acrid smell about it. I surmised it was something to do with the cooking. She had a half Mexican look, olive complexion, high forehead, chiseled cheekbones. The boy looked the same though he gave the appearance of some waif or stray, dressed in clothes that seemed slightly shabby and a little too big for him. His round eyes stared at me as if I were an intruder. I looked to see if there was a pot on the stove making the smell, but there wasn’t. After coffee, I told her she should see the concierge and get the door fixed.

It turned out to be the beginning of a friendship of sorts, bumping into her now and then in the hall, usually at nights, and one time, maybe a couple of weeks later in casual conversation, she asked if I owned a car and I said I did. It was an old Studebaker, a bit of a clunker I’d had for years, my one extravagance. After that she seemed to become a little friendlier. Then things progressed to the point where she let me share her bed one evening. I was happy for the first time in a long while. I went to work with a spring in my step, smiled at people, and stopped feeding the squirrels. Even the street preacher had moved on.

Her name was Jess; she had dark auburn hair and small beautiful breasts. I told her I loved her. She smiled and turned away. One thing that did rouse her interest was my circumcision. It provided a certain amount of brute fascination, initially anyway. I explained its link to Jewish tradition and she simply laughed. I couldn’t blame her. The whole clipped dick thing is quite bizarre when you think about it. But I couldn’t win over the boy. He still glared at me every time I visited, as if I was some sort of trespasser. When I asked Jess about her past, her family and where she was from, she avoided my questions. So after a while I simply gave up. Some people are secretive by nature and she certainly was. I assumed there must have been hurts and distress too raw to recall. No mention was made of a husband, ex or otherwise, or father for the boy. I let my own inquiries lapse and said little about my own recent piece of conjugal history. I was too happy to care for the moment.

A short time after that, I sensed a slight change in her manner. She seemed tense, impatient and irritable and started talking about wanting to travel to Boston. She said she’d friends there and suggested we make a trip of it. I agreed, thinking an outing would put a smile back into the equation. We drove up a week or so later with me wondering what had brought on the change, the slight chilling of things, at least from her side. She seemed nervous as we drove up, a little wired and agitated so I started to think I’d made a mistake. I asked at one stage if there was a problem, but she merely shrugged, became more sullen and sunk into herself. The boy by contrast was lively, chatting and pointing at things as we travelled the freeway.

Boston is usually attractive this time of year, the trees, the buildings, the patrician city. Somehow, in my mind, it was connected with urbane intellectuals. Perhaps it was just a literary thing in my case, reading Robert Lowell from varsity days. Old city, old families, that kind of thing. ‘The Lowell’s talk to the Cabot’s and the Cabot’s talk to God.’ I remembered that line from somewhere.

When we reached the outskirts of the city, she said she wanted to freshen up, so I parked the car, not far from a nearby railway station. I wasn’t familiar with the place but she seemed to know where she was going.

Ten minutes, she said and took the boy. I wanted to go with her but she shook her head, no, so I sat and waited.

Half an hour later I was out hunting for them both, anxious at first, then a little frantic. After an hour I went back to the car and opened her bag. It was stuffed with newspaper and a couple of old bricks.

I dumped it in the nearest trashcan then sat in the car for a while, staring out through the windscreen at nothing. She’d got her free ride. Loves old familiar tale, I mused. Hearts ripe and shiny as little apples, then worms through the core.

I reached for the key then turned the car south. What a fucking goof. What a complete schnook.

I kind of started to miss our resident street-side preacher. Was there deep in the heart of America a moral malaise? Were we coming apart at the seams or was it just something to do with my present blue funk? I would have dropped a coin in his cup, if he had had one.

I booked my passage the following day.

ABSTRACTION

The day before I left for Europe, I started feeding the squirrels again. Next to the Chrysler and galleries, the thing I started to love about New York was the squirrels. Nature free and uninhibited in the middle of a crowded metropolis. It took me out of myself for a while, watching those creatures for part of each evening. Wall-Street and marsupials; a nice contradiction. Animals help humanize a city. We should have cows and goats too. I’ve never owned a dog, not so much as even a gold fish. Perhaps when I get back, I thought.

Inside the MOMA, I stood in front of a sizable Rothko. The abstract squares glowed like a stain-glass window. They always intrigued me. There’s something architectural about the works; perhaps that’s what drew me to them in the first place. I’m a bit of a Bauhaus fan. And maybe the fact that he was Jewish as well. I don’t know. But I never really subscribed to the redemptive metaphysical mumbo jumbo loaded onto the works. If you stare at them long enough the forms start to hover in a misty haze, kind of mesmeric. But I didn’t sob in front of them as the artist did when he painted the things. He wanted to capture the power and poignancy of poetry, he said, in order to move us or save us. I was too busy looking at the aesthetics. That’s the trouble with us architects. You look at form, line and colour, constructing it in the mind not the heart. I’d made a bit of a study of the man back in my student days, part fascination and part vocation to do with minimalist design. I was aware huge claims were being made for this sort of stuff, back in the fifties; the salvation of America no less. Despite all that, I stood now in front of these coloured windows and tried to let them do their promised work of deliverance. It didn’t save my soul. It didn’t save the artist’s either, poor bugger.

I went back to my apartment and stopped outside Jess’s door for a moment, not quite knowing why. Would the new tenants find all her bits and pieces or had she arranged to have them shipped out? I could have asked the concierge but didn’t. Truth is I didn’t want to know. But later I changed my mind and went down to his office and casually enquired if he knew about our former Mexican resident. Had she left a forwarding address?

He shrugged then made a gesture close to his mouth, miming an illicit smoking habit, raising his eyes as he did it. It shocked me. Had I missed something? Did my own preoccupations blind me to other realities? Then I remembered the smell in her room and suddenly I felt afraid for her. My imagination ran several extravagant scenarios through my head. Was there some extortion involved? Was she a victim, helplessly caught up in a sinister plot? All my negative thoughts about her completely dissolved. Where was she? Was she safe? I wanted to drive back immediately to Boston and hunt down her pimp.

Instead I slumped into a battered chair inside my room, dog-tired and zapped and put on some music. I realized paint couldn’t console me, even though Schopenhauer had made a case for it. In my more gloomy moods I’d started reading the pessimist. The idea of a malignant absurdity at the very heart of things appealed in my present state of mange. But suppressing desire as a cure didn’t seem that attractive. New York is full of handsome women. And I was a sucker for a woman in a sharp suit; that hint of the masculine packaging the obvious feminine. That’s where it had started with my wife. My ex-wife. Where is she now? Balling some young Ivy League College professor, her head pressed up against his erudite beard.

I’d long since given up on my Jewish heritage. My parents followed the Reform Movement for a time but the Synagogue soon went by the way. As close as I’d personally come to some kind of rapprochement was reading the Book of Job. There’s some fine verse in that book. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot. That’s a great line. So apt. Waters churning, bubbling, activated by a hidden, monstrous force. I was looking for solace somewhere in the tome, man and his sufferings and all that, but the tenor of the text frankly disgusted me. Jehovah comes across as some kind of sadist. It’s certainly the image of an oriental despot carelessly playing with peoples’ lives, just to prove a point. How many die in the process? Who cares? He doesn’t even answer the fucking question, just browbeats the man into submission like some monomaniacal bully. The ultimate indignity, when you think about it, was the actual restoration of Job’s new family and fortunes, like some crass compensatory deal. In the end it just made me angry. I felt let down and ended up wishing I’d never opened the book. So much for traditional Jewish comfort. Mush! A piece of schlock.

Anyway, I’d gone for Schopenhauer’s aesthetic shtick, trying it on for several months with regular visits to the gallery, staring at abstract squares; blue, red and whatnot. Several months is a fair enough test, I think. Now it was music. A drowning man will grasp at anything. Ferreting through my collection, I came across a piece I didn’t know I had. Perhaps it wasn’t mine. I entertained the idea briefly that my ex’s bearded lothario had inadvertently left it behind on one of his rutting exertions. Whatever the case, I picked it up and stared at it for a minute. It had caught my eye because of the title. Job- A Masque for Dancing, a work by the English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams. The CD cover displayed a radical print by the romantic poet, William Blake.

As I lay in the dark on my bed and listened to the music, the first few notes immediately held me. Soft and mellow yet somehow compelling. I closed my eyes, covered my face with my hands and let the mellifluous sound wash over my soul and engulf me. Five minutes into the piece, the music suddenly shifted gear, building itself into a mounting crescendo. Then without any appreciable warning, I was bawling my eyes out, crying out into the dark as wave on wave of bellowing trumpets blew their notes through my helpless brains. My heart was in rags and there I was weeping in the dark without check or restraint.

Why was I weeping? Delayed shock? Suppressed grief? Anyone observing might have thought so, so plaintive and pathetic were my cries. Afterwards I wondered if something else might have been at work here. Loss of innocence and all that stuff? Sounds dopey, I know, for a man of my age. Was I flipping out?

I played the same piece over and over, tormenting myself with it till I was wrung dry. It had strange effect on me, both undoing and sustaining me at the same time. It only happened during the elegiac moments when the horns were blaring, a strange mix of elements where sadness became fused with acclaim and ovation. It was an odd contradiction, melancholy and triumph in mutual embrace. It spoke of a pervasive sadness in the same breath that it called upon you to prevail.

Was it the sort of thing the philosopher claimed, or Rothko for that matter; those moments of flight into sheer elation without denying the dark? Here we are, it said, wandering down some dirty corridor of the world, defeated, yet somehow consoled.

I stood up and walked across to the window and looked out. On the street below me the constant flow of people shuffling by. I opened the window and the clamour of traffic rose off the bitumen with a potent smell of gasoline. It was strangely reassuring. I saw two lovers stop and embrace. The man groped at the woman’s ass.

Love is one of those abstract words we use with frequent abandon. The meaning of a word is its public use, someone once said. What if we say, I love you, and then unsay it? I watched them kiss. Then Jess came to mind and I remembered she’d not used that loaded word. Where was she now? I looked up for a minute at a dark glacial sky. It was scattered with a billion burning suns that didn’t warm anything in the vicinity.

My bags were already packed for the following big day.

ABSURD

It took eleven hours to reach London. Heathrow was teeming with people. I caught the underground into the city, then a taxi to my hotel, not far from Russell Square. I wondered if it was named after the English skeptic but didn’t ask. My room was small but the bed was comfortable and I immediately stretched out on top, closed my eyes and fell asleep. Two hours later I woke to the sound of bells or chimes ringing faintly in the distance. When I looked out the window I thought I could see the tip of Big Ben. I’m not a traditionalist. My preferences tend to hover on the side of minimalism but I’m not completely averse to the return of decoration, if done ironically of course.

Down in the hotel lobby I met a New Zealander, who it transpired was booked on the same tour.

New Zealand? I said. I didn’t want to come the dumb Yank, but geography wasn’t my strong point. Somewhere in the South Pacific, I hazarded.

The fellow nodded. No nukes, he said, in an affected American drawl.

He’d picked my accent but his remark left me puzzled. He didn’t elaborate so I didn’t pursue the matter. He himself looked about my vintage, perhaps a bit older. At one point he mentioned he was planning to visit the Tate. I’d had the British Museum in mind. He’d already been there.

His name was David Duncan. I reached out a hand. Saul Wasserman, I said.

We chatted for a bit. It turned out he was a lecturer in art and classics at some institution. I didn’t catch the name. He looked the arty type, chiseled face, slightly unconventional manner of dress but without pretension. He displayed a certain measured reticence mixed with what I took to be an underlying strain of middling gloom; knight of the sorrowful countenance and all that. I could have been wrong. I asked if he’d travelled this way before and he said it was his first major foray to Europe. To see art in the flesh, he said, eyes lighting up. He wanted to know what I did and where I was from and I told him. In the ensuing conversation it became clear he was familiar with trends in architecture, my own particular field. We sat down for a coffee and had an interesting exchange about the Bauhaus. In passing he mentioned that the school accepted women into its ranks.

With their geometric haircuts, he said.

I was unaware of that myself. He was an intriguing fellow and I found him engaging. He spoke in rapid bursts, almost effusive at times, but when I asked more personal questions he immediately clammed up. I thought I detected a pained expression wash over his face when I asked if he was married. He avoided a direct answer by asking me the same in return. I said yes and no and he seemed to instinctively understand and became more at ease. I didn’t persist with the subject.

So, you’re off to the Tate tomorrow?

Too right, he said, voice eager, almost like an excited school boy.

Too right? I queried.

He half smiled. Yes and indubitably, he replied, more subdued. A New Zealand expression.

I decided then and there to drop my own plans and ask if he’d mind my tagging along with him. You can be my guide, I said.

Through the dark, wild wood, he answered in a flat, uninflected tone.

I looked at him quickly. Had he read me so soon?

The Tate Modern, as a building, appealed immediately. From a distance it looked spare, unpretentious and yet imposing. We stood for a minute just taking it in from the Millennial Bridge. The bridge I didn’t particularly like. A little too Buck Rogers space-age for me. It appeared to be straining after a contemporary feel while failing to look retro. I mentioned the name of the firm I worked for back in the States and David nodded politely. There was something of the gentleman about him, a mild mannered self-sufficiency that rubbed up against a hint of roughness lingering round the edges. It was an interesting frisson.

See the paradox he said, shading his eyes as we stared at the building.

I didn’t.

A disused factory, symbol of modernity, now housing art critical of that very modernity.

I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. I hoped my noncommittal answer didn’t disappoint him. I’d started to like the guy.

But the remark came back to me once inside and standing directly in front of a large green painting crowded with roughly configured nudes. My New Zealand guide on seeing the piece displayed what could only be described as boyish enthusiasm. The reserve was gone, replaced with an abrupt and unexpected expansiveness.

Kirchner’s Bathers, he exclaimed, as if I would immediately know. He stood there astonished, staring at the thing then turned to me as if suddenly remembering himself. German romantics, he announced, half apologizing. Railed against the industrial revolution, preaching the gospel primitivism. Back to nature. He moved in close to the painting as if he were looking for flaws, then drifted back for a wider view.

Never envisaged it being so large, he declared, shaking his head. They practiced what they preached. Stripped naked and splashed about at the Moritzburg lakes in true Arcadian fashion.

Proto Hippies, I said.

True, he said, nodding. Same kind of idealistic passion. Very bohemian. Parents wanted him to become an architect. He looked at me quickly, checking himself. No offence.

None taken, I said and laughed.

The place was crowded, people streaming past us hardly bothering to give the painting a second glance. I’d never met anyone before so enthralled by a single picture. It was quite refreshing; a grown man captivated by what he was looking at. There was something of the child about him, something charming and natural and unaffected which made me immediately like and trust him.

Didn’t Hitler confiscate and destroy some of this stuff? I asked. I suddenly remembered a story from father mentioning an uncle who’d been a bit of a collector in his time. Jews who’d saved their lives but lost their complete inheritance. It was a vague and indistinct memory. David looked at me now with the recognition of someone who’d just found a friend. It pleased me immensely. There was a small elation lifting inside me, something I’d not known most of my adult life.

-

On our return from the Tate, we stopped off at St. Paul’s where David suggested I offer some comment, me being the architect.

The cathedral looked magnificent yet somewhat incongruous, hemmed in as it was among terraced blocks and brown brick buildings that surrounded it. It was a beautiful edifice, slightly overblown while holding its own against the encroaching Victorian and Georgian stuff. But it did look a little silly, isolated and marooned as it was, backed up and wedged into a corner as all the profane and sacrilegious traffic rushed by.

I waited as a series of red double-decker buses lumbered past us, followed closely by a string of polished black taxis. Very English. All very quaint.

Pillars, domes, entablatures, steps, the usual classical trappings, I said. I tried to locate the exact element that made it somewhat excessive. See how they’ve got the height. They’ve built it two storied. One classical temple stacked on another, essentially.

Portentous but slightly absurd, David suggested. Triumph of the new faith over the old.

I nodded. It was an acute observation.

Inside, a service was in progress; Evensong. We sat down at the back and listened among a motley collection of people. Hardcore believers were in a little huddled knot further toward the front. We’d come, like others around us, not for the service but for the aesthetics, the teetering marble and tortured stone. We were at the dying end of religion if this was taken as indication. Perhaps in another fifty years the thing would fall into complete disuse, commandeered by some historic Trust or other.

The first lesson was from the Book of Job. It caught my attention of course, having read the text. The message was all about making obeisance before naked power and inscrutability, the vicar suggested. He droned on for a while about humanity being dust and not understanding. A complete snow job.

Not an idea Pericles would have recognized, David whispered. He looked up at the arched roof towering above us.

A baroque birthday cake. I muttered. Doors big enough for a Cyclops to barge through.

We didn’t wait for the second and third lessons.

Outside, we stopped for a minute to look back at the edifice. People scampered by in sudden bursts across the street, dodging a constant steady stream of traffic.

David pointed to the tall ribbed dome that topped the cathedral. Punters still on the teat, he remarked with a touch of contempt.

It did look like a breast with a nipple now that he’d mentioned it. The marble mounted in front of us looked recently cleaned. Staring at it, I saw beauty, symmetry and classical order. Order was something I needed in my life. Beauty too. How nice, I thought, to live beneath such a comfy domed sky, stuffed with the cry of hosannas. I mentioned it to David as he took a quick photo. At home in the cosmos, I murmured.

He gave a half smile. But for the slopes of hell sheering away under your feet.

-

At dinner that evening, back at the hotel and halfway through our meal, a loud drunken voice, three tables over, shouted something before the figure fell with a thudding crash off his chair. A woman screamed followed by the sound of a breaking glass hitting the floor. Everyone went suddenly quiet. The man who’d tipped off his chair was slumped down into a fetal position and didn’t look like he was going to get up in a hurry. Waiters arrived with mop and bucket but the man lay there unmoving. There was an intermittent stream of abuse from the poor schmuck as they tried to coax him back onto his seat.

In our darkest hour, where do we go? David asked sardonically.

The woman at the table was becoming a little hysterical.

To the bottle, I answered. I wasn’t a great drinker myself. When Judith left, I did find myself on the occasional dark night nipping into the juice. It just made me sleepy.

They eventually got the guy up off the floor and the couple left soon after that, to everyone’s relief. We ourselves followed outside not long after, and there on the side of the street was the schmo from the restaurant, standing alone and looking slightly befuddled, staring up at the stars like a man with nothing in his hand but a bundle of sticks.

Could even Christopher Wren help this fellow? I asked.

David nodded. Poor bastard.

Actually in my darkest hour I’d gone to the doctor to get a prescription. The anti-depressants had taken a while to kick in. I’d brought the little red pills with me but hoped the trip would help break the habit.

We walked several blocks, passing crowds of people jostling for room on the pavement. Most of the time I was looking up at hotel complexes, department stores, office blocks, Victorian and Gothic, terraces, crescents, squares, some neoclassical, some mongrel combinations; Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Moorish and whatnot together with matching facades and wrought iron fencing that captured the pervasive feel of the nineteenth century.

David was looking down, at street level, at people, the animation, the hustle and throng. Cities at night provide warmth. It struck me now, seeing it in a different place. The city is the new hearth. It’s where people migrate like moths, drawn to illumination, a giant fireside round which we all huddle, clustered in front of a thousand comforting fires that glow and give off heat. I felt a certain comfort. In fact I felt strangely buoyed. This was the herd breathing as one, a collective heat rising up off the back of the animal, feeling the ersatz communal pull, the fake bonding, the common brotherhood and feral coupling.

We found a tavern nearby and had only sat down a minute with our drinks when two young women came over and started to chat. One of them was blonde with eyes as blue as the black-lit face on a watch. Smiles were exchanged, mostly mine from our side. The place was a babble of noise; talk, music, some down-beat item with upbeat cleavage. The city, at night, I was reminded, was a mating venue where rutting season is running and continuous. More heat, more life.

Early in the exchange my New Zealand companion casually asked the young women what they had to hold in their hands as they walked toward the gates of oblivion.

I shot him a look and shook my head, wondering what the fuck he was up to? I think I actually snorted in disbelief. They excused themselves shortly after that.

David returned my querulous gape with a deadpan stare.

What was that all about? I asked, slightly annoyed.

They were on the game, he said.

Were they? I said. I hadn’t noticed. What was one supposed to notice? It made me feel like a bit of a klutz but I made a mental note to leave my fellow traveler behind on any such further excursions. I gave him my best disapproving stare. Drink your beer, I said. I was a little pissed off. But a minute later I saw the funny side of it. Maybe it was the beer, but I replied to the question he’d put to the women in my best doleful voice. Mumbled phrases no one believes in, I muttered.

He shrugged as I glanced across the bar to see where the women had gone. They’d attached themselves to a group of younger men further back in the joint. I consoled myself by thinking they were probably relations of Judith.

Who wonders about these things anymore? I asked.

He looked at me, frowning a little. I wasn’t being