The Line Between

No, we went along like that until after Marianne. After she'd moved in with him, and after she'd left him two months and five days later for a playwright who'd written a one–woman show about Duse for her. I bor–rowed plane fare to New York because of the way he sounded on the phone. He was fine all the way through the nice dinner at the deli, and fine through the usual amble along Columbus, twenty blocks or so down, twenty blocks back. It wasn't until we were in the apartment, until I'd found a hairbrush of Marianne's and casually asked him where I should put it, that he came apart. I held him awkwardly while he cried, and Millamant came down from the bookshelf where she generally lived to sniff at his tears and butt her hard round head against his chin. It was a very long night, and I don't know whether I did or said anything right or anything wrong for him. I was just with him, that's all.

He came to Avicenna more often after that, always spending at least a weekend, sleeping on a futon, content with my books and record albums if I was in rehearsal; ready for a walk on balmy evenings—he never quite lost the unmistakable near–waddle of the ballet dancer—equally easy with silences long grown as comfortable as the lazily circular arguments that might go on until one of us dozed off. I recall asking one midnight, during his last visit, «Do you remember what your dad used to say, every time he heard us discussing something or other?»

Sam laughed in the darkness. " 'Those two, they're a couple of alte kockers already! Old men sitting in the park, squabbling about Tennessee Williams and Mickey Mantle.' Fifteen, sixteen, and he had us pegged.»

I remember everything about that visit, when he holed up in my house for a full week, trying so determinedly to quit smoking. The walks got longer, to keep his mind off cigarettes; he managed quite well during the daytime, but the nights were hard, as I could tell from the smell in the bathroom most mornings. Even so, he cut

down steadily until, a couple of days before he left, he got by on two half–smoked cigarettes, and we went out to my favorite Caribbean restaurant to celebrate. He had the jerk chicken and I had the ropa vieja.

There's an unmarked alley not far from my house that leads to a free–way overpass, and from there into a children's park as dainty and min–iature as a scene in one of those gilded Victorian eggs. We walked there after dinner, talking obliquely of Marianne, for the first time in a long while, and of my ex–wives. It was when we stopped to drink at a child–size fountain that Sam said, «You know, when you think about it, you and I have been involved with a remarkable number of highly improbable women. I mean, for just two people.»

«We could start a museum," I suggested. «The Museum of Truly Weird Relationships.» That set us off. We walked round and round for hours, opening up the one aspect of our lives kept almost entirely private for all the years of our friendship. The public defender, the bookstore owner, the poet, the set designer, the truck mechanic—it doesn't matter which of us was embrangled with whom; only that the romances almost invariably ended as comedies of errors, leaving us to lick our wounds and shrug, and present our debacles to each other like wry trophies. We laughed and snorted, and said, " What ?» and «Oh, you're kidding» and «You never said a word about that—that's a whole wing of the museum just by itself," until the children and their parents were all gone home, and we were the only two voices in the little park. It was just then that Sam told me about Emilia.

«She's too young," he said. «She is twenty–six–and–a–half years younger than I am, and she's from Metuchen, New Jersey, and she's not Jewish, and if you say either bimbo or bunnyrabbit, Jake, I will punch you right in the eye. I shouldn't have mentioned her, anyway. I don't think this one belongs in the Museum at all.»

«Hoo–ha," I said. He looked at me, and I said, «Sorry, sorry, hoo–ha withdrawn—it's just I've never heard you sound like that. So. Would you maybe marry this one?»

«You're the chap who marries people. If I were the sort who gets mar–ried, I'd be married by now.» He fell silent, and we walked on until we came to the swings and the sliding pond and the monkey bars. We sat down on the swings, pushing ourselves idly in small circles, letting our shoes scrape the ground. Sam said, «Emilia covers New York for a paper in Bergen County—that's how I met her, about a year ago. She takes the bus in on weekends.»

«A journalist, yet. Not a cricket?»

«Good night, no, a real writer. If there were any real newspapers left, she'd have a real career ahead of her. I keep telling her to get into TV, but she hates it—she won't even watch the News Hour.» He pushed off harder, gripping the chains of the swing and leaning back. «The whole thing's crazy, Jake, but it's not weird. It's just crazy.» He looked over his shoulder at me and grinned suddenly. «But Millamant likes her.»