Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,158

skirt, Gloria in her flowered dress, as if they too were running on different levels of pavement, but in the same body, the two of them combined.

—

At the luggage carousel, Pino waits beside her. He has no suitcase to pick up. She rubs her hands together, nervously. Why, still, this small feeling of tightness at her core? Not even her own two gin and tonics have done their work. But he too is edgy, she notices, as he moves from foot to foot and adjusts his shoulder bag. She likes his nervousness—it brings him down to earth, makes him solid. He has already suggested that he can share a taxi with her into Manhattan, if she’d like. He is on his way to the Village, wants to hear some jazz.

She wants to tell him that he doesn’t look like a jazz man, that there’s something folk-rock about him, that he might fit well into a Bob Dylan song, or he might be found with the liner notes for Springsteen in his pocket, but jazz doesn’t fit. Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them. If only she could turn to Pino and say that she’ll come with him tonight, to a jazz club, sit at a table with a tasseled lamp, feel the saxophone trill through her, stand and move to the tiny dance floor and align her long body against his, maybe even allow him to rub his lips along her neck.

She watches the line of suitcases tumble from the conveyor belt onto the carousel below: none of them hers. A group of kids on the far side jump on and off the carousel, to the amusement of their parents. She waves across and mugs a face at the youngest, who is perched atop a giant red suitcase.

—Your children, she says as she turns to Pino. Do you have photographs?

A silly, awkward question. She has spoken without thinking, leaned too close to him, asked too much. But he pulls out a cell phone and scrolls through the pictures, shows her a young teenage girl, dark, serious, attractive. He starts to scroll again for a picture of his boy, when a security guard comes right up beside him.

—No cell phone use in the terminal, sir.

—Excuse me?

—No cell phones, no cameras.

—Not your day, she says, smiling, as she leans down to pick up her small traveling bag.

—Maybe, maybe not, he says.

Across the way, a high yelp. The kids riding suitcases on the moving carousel have fallen afoul of the security guard too. She and Pino turn to each other. She feels much younger all of a sudden: the thrill of flirtation, her whole body shot through with lightness.

—

As they step from the terminal he says that they’ll take the Queensboro Bridge, if that’s okay with her. He will drop her off first and then go downtown.

So he knows the city, she thinks. He’s been here before. This place belongs to him too. Another surprise. She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours.

—

Sabine Pass and Johnson’s Bayou, Beauregard and Vermilion, Acadia and New Iberia, Merryville and DeRidder, Thibodaux and Port Bolivar, Napoleonville and Slaughter, Point Cadet and Casino Row, Moss Point and Pass Christian, Escambia and Walton, Diamondhead and Jones Mill, Americus, America.

Names in her mind, flooding.

Rain outside the terminal. He stands under a small ledge, pulls a packet of cigarettes from his inside pocket. He tamps the pack with the heel of his hand, shifts a cigarette upward, offers it. She shakes her head no. She used to smoke, not anymore, an old habit from her days at Yale; almost everyone in the theater smoked.

But she likes the fact that he lights up and lets the smoke blow in her direction, that it will get in her hair, that she will own the scent of it later.

—

The taxi slides through the rain. The last of the storm has blown over the city, a final exhausted bow, an endfall. He hands her a card before the taxi pulls in by the awning on Park Avenue. He scribbles his name and the number of his cell on the back.

—Fancy, he says, surveying the street.

He picks her small bag out of the back of the cab, leans across and kisses