Out on the Cutting Edge

There was a point, I suppose, when it was appropriate for me to give up my room and begin paying my share of the expenses at the loft.

And there was a point, too, where we might have gone on to talk about commitment and permanence and, I suppose, marriage.

But we didn't do any of this, and, having left it undone, it became impossible for things to remain as they had been. We disengaged gradually, in little fits and starts. Our times together were increasingly marked by moods and silences, and our times apart became more frequent. We decided— I honestly forget who suggested it— that we ought to see other people. We did, and subsequently found that made us that much more uncomfortable with each other. And at last, gently, and with a surprising lack of drama, I returned a couple of books she had lent me and retrieved the last of my clothing, and I took a cab uptown, and that was that.

It had dragged on long enough for the ending to be something of a relief, but even so I felt lonely a lot of the time, and possessed of a sense of loss. I'd felt less at the breakup of my marriage some years previously, but of course I was drinking then, so I didn't really feel anything.

So I went to a lot of meetings, and sometimes I talked about what I was feeling at meetings, and sometimes I kept it to myself. I had tried dating shortly after the breakup, but I didn't seem to have the heart for it.

Now I was beginning to think that it might be time for me to start seeing women again, or a woman. I kept having the thought, but I hadn't yet reached the point of acting on it.

All of which put a curious spin on the business of going door-to-door in a West Side rooming house and making conversation with single women. Most of them were a little young for me, but not all of them were. And there is something about the kind of interview I was conducting that facilitates flirtation. I'd learned this when I was a cop, and a married one at that.

Sometimes, asking my endless questions about the elusive Paula Hoeldtke, I would be aware of a strong attraction to the woman I was questioning. Sometimes I sensed, too, that the current ran in both directions, that the attraction was reciprocal. I wrote little mental scripts, moving us toward emotional intimacy, and from the doorway to the bed.

But I could never bring myself to take the next step. I felt out of sync, and by the time I left the rooming house, having talked to six or ten or a dozen people, my mood had darkened and I felt unutterably alone.

This time all it took was one conversation to bring on the feeling. I went back to my hotel room and sat in front of my TV set until it was time to go to the meeting.

AtSt. Paul 's that night the speaker was a housewife fromOzonePark . She told us how she used to take the first drink of the day as her husband'sPontiac was pulling out of the driveway. She kept her vodka under the sink, in a container that had previously held oven cleaner. "The first time I told this story," she said, "a woman said, 'Oh, dear Jesus, suppose you grabbed the wrong jar and drank the real oven cleaner.' 'Honey,' I told her, 'get real, will you? There was no wrong jar.

There was no real oven cleaner.

I lived in that house for thirteen years and I never cleaned the oven.' Anyway," she said, "that was my social drinking."

Different meetings have different formats. AtSt. Paul 's the meetings run an hour and a half, and the Friday night meetings are step meetings, centering upon one of the twelve steps of AA's program of recovery. This particular meeting was on the fifth step, but I don't remember what the speaker had to say on the subject or what particular words of wisdom I contributed when it was my turn.

At ten o'clock we all stood to say the Lord's Prayer, except for a woman named Carole who makes a point of not taking part in the prayer. Then I folded my chair and stacked it, dropped my coffee cup in the trash, carried ashtrays up to the front of the room, talked with a couple of fellows, and turned when Eddie Dunphy called my name. "Oh, hello," I said. "I didn't see you."

"I was in the back, I got here a few minutes late. I liked what you had to say."

"Thanks," I said, wondering what I'd said. He asked if I wanted to have coffee, and I said a few of us were going over to the Flame, and why didn't he join us?

We walked a block south on Ninth and wound up at the big corner table with six or seven other people.

I had a sandwich and fries and some more coffee. The conversation was mostly about politics. It was less than two months before the election, and people were saying what everybody says every four years, that it was a damned shame there wasn't anybody more interesting to vote for.