some small measure, comforted. There was someone in the world she could talk to about simple unimportant things, a charming woman who spoke without grandeur or condescension. Mary looked up at the snowy plaster of the ceiling, listened to the jostle of traffic. The next time she talked to Zoe she'd chide her, gently, for keeping this lovely new friend of hers a secret.
1979/ The songs said love was everywhere. Under Will's window a man in a hunter's cap and crusty plaid pants spent half the night crying out, “Hey, do you love me, do you love me, hey, motherfucker, I'm talking to you.” You could call the police but he just came back again—this was his territory. Will played records to drown him out, rock singers and jazz trombonists who were all asking, with music, the same insistent question. Do you love me, do you love me, hey, fucker, do you love me? Will couldn't seem to fall in love with anything so complex and elusive as another person. He didn't worry. He didn't worry much. He shared a big cold apartment with a woman friend and her five-year-old daughter. He had a tight little orbit of friends. Romance happened elsewhere, to other people. It could come to him in its own time. He was twenty-six, and didn't dislike himself too much. Only a little, only at moments. Sometimes, when no one could hear, after a day of classes he sat at his desk and let himself emit a series of sharp little moans over all the meetings, the shifty victories with students, the potential for humiliation that seemed to grow endlessly from the seam connecting his job as the students' master to his more complex, and perhaps truer, role as their servant. Will thought sometimes of the night years ago when he'd looked into his father's angry face, his steady feeding, and said, 'I'm going to be a teacher.' He'd said it merely for effect, to confound his father's expectations. But afterward he'd kept thinking of his father's outraged response: 'You got to go to Harvard to teach pickaninnies?' The speck of sauce on his father's chin, the soft dead blue of the dining-room wallpaper. As Will had traveled around the country, picking up jobs as a waiter or an errand boy—as he'd prepared himself to leave his childhood and begin a life of work—he'd found his old ideas about architecture slipping away and he'd begun to know, gradually, with a kind of heady, satisfying helplessness, that a teacher was what he would in fact become.
So he taught fifth grade on Beacon Hill, for sixteen thousand dollars a year. He had his friends, his carefully inexpensive dinners out, his French or Italian movies. He walked, read, bought clothes in discount stores. He looked for love.
He met the man on an ordinary night. He met him in a downtown bar where old men offered drinks and porcelain smiles, the muscular hunger of fathers, to young cowboys just off the bus. Will went there for the strangeness of it. He wasn't expecting anything. He'd drink a beer or two, talk to the old guys. He liked them; he thought of them as ghostly heroes gone to the shadow realm. They came from another era. They'd spent their best years crouched in public toilets, bravely searching the silences of city parks. Now they were like refugees arrived in a land of plenty. If their smiles were ravenous, if they bird-dogged some kid just in from Worcester or Fall River, Will could forgive them. They were his uncles, they'd been misused. They had stories you wouldn't believe.
The man stood near the door, drinking a beer. He stood in the jukebox light as if it were an ordinary thing to be so large and fair and handsome, to have a firm heavy jaw and shoulders broad as the wings of a plow. He was too much for this place. Even the uncles were afraid of him. The uncles could manage a nervous boy from a dying textile town. They could speak with wry insistence into the face of some skinny kid's jerry-rigged self-assurance, because they knew what was in his heart. They knew fear better than anybody. They'd lived fear, they'd survived it. They'd married without love, they'd been beaten by criminals and by the police, spit their own teeth out on the pavement. Now they sat boldly on bar-stools, neat and perfumed, prosperous, talking in gentle voices to the more privileged manifestations