Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,159

her on each cheek. She notices with a smile that he has one foot on, one foot off the curb.

He fumbles in his pocket. She looks away and she hears a sudden click. He has taken her photograph with his cell phone. She is not quite sure how to respond. Erase it, file it, make it his screen saver? She thinks of herself, there, pixelated, alongside his children, carried around in his pocket, to his jazz club, to his clinic, to his home.

She has never done this with a man before, but she takes her own card out and tucks it into his shirt pocket, taps it closed with the palm of her hand. She feels her face tighten again. Too forward. Too flirtatious. Too easy.

It used to bother her terribly, as a teenager, that her mother and grandmother had worked the streets. She thought it might rebound on her someday, that she would find herself too much in love with love. Or that it might be dirty. Or that her friends would find out. Or, worse, that she might ask a boy to pay for it. She was the last of her high school friends to even kiss a boy: a kid in school once called her the Reluctant African Queen. Her first kiss ever was just after science class before social studies. He had a broad face and dark eyes. He held her in the doorway and kept his foot on the frame. Only the constant knocking on the door from a teacher separated them. She walked home with him that day, hand in hand, through the streets of Poughkeepsie. Gloria saw her from the porch of their small house and smiled deeply. She and the boy lasted all the way through college. She had even contemplated marrying him, but he went to Chicago to take a trading job. She went home to Gloria then, wept for a day.

Afterward, Gloria said to her that it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

—So you’ll call me, then? she asks him.

—I’ll call you, yes.

—Really? she asks with arched brow.

—Of course, he replies.

He extends his shoulder playfully. She rocks backward as if in a cartoon, her arms spread wide, flailing. She is not sure why she does it, but for a moment she doesn’t really care—there is an electricity to it, it makes her laugh.

He kisses her again, this time on the lips, quickly, smartly. She almost wishes her co-workers were here, that they could see her, bidding goodbye to an Italian man, a doctor, on Park Avenue, in the dark, in the cold, in the rain, in the wind, in the night. Like there might some secret camera that beams it all back to the offices in Little Rock, everyone looking up from the tax forms to watch her wave good-bye, to see him turn his body in the back of the cab, his arm raised, a shadow on his face, a smile.

She hears the hiss of the taxi tires as the car pulls away. Then she cups her hands out beyond the awning and runs some rainwater through her hair.

—

The doorman smiles, although it has been years since she’s seen him. A Welshman. He used to sing on Sundays when she, Gloria, and her sister came to visit. She can’t quite recall his name. His mustache has gone gray.

—Miss Jaslyn! Where’ve you been?

And then she remembers: Melvyn. He reaches for the small bag and for a moment she thinks he’s going to say how much she’s grown. But all he says is, in a grateful way: They put me on the night shift.

She is not quite sure if she should kiss his cheek or not—this evening of kissing—but he solves the dilemma by turning away.

—Melvyn, she says, you haven’t changed a bit.

He pats his stomach, smiles. She is wary of elevators, she would like to take the stairs, but a teenage boy is there with his hat and white gloves on.

—Madame, says the elevator boy.

—You staying long, Miss Jaslyn? asks Melvyn, but already the gate is closing.

She smiles at him from the back of the elevator.

—I’ll call up to Mrs. Soderberg’s, he says through the grille, and let them know you’re here.

The elevator boy stares straight ahead. He takes great care with the Otis. He doesn’t engage her in conversation, his head tilted slightly to the ceiling and his body as if it’s counting out rhythm. She gets the sense