Small Town

At 7:40, Jay McGann came back from his morning run and went straight to the shower. He was dressed by eight, and by the time his wife got to the table he had their breakfast ready. He’d be at his desk by nine, as he was every morning. Writing was a business, after all, and if you wanted to get anywhere with it you had to approach it in a businesslike fashion.

He asked his wife how her omelet was, and she said it was fine, and then she asked him if anything was wrong. No, he said, nothing was wrong. Why? Because you seem different, she said.

“Well, now that you mention it,” he said, and he told her he’d been thinking that he ought to get an office. Someplace just for writing, so that he could go there every day and do his work and then come home. John Cheever, he told her, had had an office early in his career in the basement of his apartment building, and every morning he put on a suit and tie and stuck a hat on his head, and he rode the elevator to the basement and went into a room and took off the jacket and the tie and the hat and went to work. And put them on again at five o’clock, and went home.

She said, Just for work, right? And he said, Sure, what else?

At 8:12, Jim Galvin woke up on the couch of his Alphabet City apartment. He’d taken off his shirt and shoes but was still wearing his pants and socks. There was a bad taste in his mouth, and a pounding in the back of his head.

He drank a glass of water, threw it up, and drank another. When that one stayed down he drank one more glass of water with a couple of aspirin. He showered, and when he went to shave his hand was trembling. He put the safety razor down and went into the other room, and there was still plenty of booze left in the open bottle, and most of the bottles left in the case. He poured himself a drink, just a short one, and when he resumed shaving his hand was rock steady.

Maury Winters got up four times during the night. Around seven he decided that was as much sleep as he was going to get, and got busy taking the fistful of herbs he took every morning. He wondered if they were doing any good. One was supposed to shrink his prostate, which would be a blessing, but so far he couldn’t see the difference.

He checked to see if they’d delivered the Times yet. They had, and he brought it in and read it. At eight-thirty his wife told him breakfast was ready, and he told her she was an angel. While he was drinking his second cup of coffee, his wife asked him if he’d had a good night.

“Every night above ground’s a good night,” he told her. “Every day being married to you is heaven.” And he got up from the table and went over and gave her a kiss.

Eddie Ragan didn’t open his eyes until 9:20. He wasn’t in his own apartment, and it took him a moment to remember where he was, and even then he couldn’t pin it down geographically. He could ask the woman who’d brought him home with her, but a check of the apartment’s other rooms didn’t turn her up. Off to work, he thought.

He’d hung out at the Kettle for a while after he finished his shift, and then he and a couple of people went next door to the Fifty-Five, and then where? It got a little hazy at that point, but he wound up at Googie’s, late, and that’s where he pulled the dame, and she’d brought him back here.

What the hell was her name, anyway? He couldn’t remember. They had a good time, he remembered that. Nice rack, and she gave head like she could teach school in the subject, he remembered that. He couldn’t quite picture her face, but was sure he’d recognize her if he saw her. Well, fairly sure.

She drank Sambuca, straight up in a little cordial glass, with three coffee beans in it. That he remembered.

Lowell Cooke was at his desk by nine-thirty. He went right to work returning phone calls and answering mail. He had a lunch date scheduled with an agent making her fall trip to New York, and one of his writers was coming by during the afternoon. And, of course, he had a stack of manuscripts to read if he ever found the time.

At breakfast his wife had asked him if everything was okay, and he said of course it was.

I’m gay, he wanted to say, but he hadn’t been able to say it, any more than he’d been able to say his name to the fellow he’d been with Monday night. I’m Lou, he’d said, and his companion for the evening had been polite enough to pretend to believe him, and to call him Lou throughout.

God, what was he going to do?

Stelli Safran rarely got to bed before three, and rarely got up before noon. Today, though, a muscle cramp woke her around ten. She went to the kitchen and ate a banana, on the chance that it might be a potassium deficiency. Or maybe it was calcium, so she drank a glass of milk.

Then again, she thought, maybe it was butter and sugar and flour, and wouldn’t it be terrible to suffer cramps because of a deficiency of any of those essential elements?

She got out a mixing bowl and made pancakes.