lobby, people are sitting cross-legged on the floor next to their bags and sacks and coats and pillows. They’re listening to the voice in front of them. Lit by a kerosene lamp, near the stopped escalator, a singular girl stands on a makeshift stage—a wide door ripped off its hinges and laid flat over some two-by-fours. She stands on top of the door, her long strands of dark hair spilling out of a blue headscarf. She looks tall, larger than life, because she’s up on a stage. She wears rags like the rest, a skirt with a frayed hem, a falling apart sweater, and torn boots. But the beige wool fits snugly over her breasts, her neck is white, her skin translucent, and her huge eyes blaze as she gestures with her hands to amplify her words. There’s a diamond smile on her face.
Already Julian is warmer. Shae never smiled. Not in the beginning, and certainly not at the end.
The young woman is reciting a humorous ditty about romantic love. It takes Julian a few moments to recognize it as a pretty solid paraphrase of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. Her captive audience is moderately amused.
“Oh, the Ideal Man!” the woman yells cheerfully. “Let me tell you about him! The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses. He should refuse all our serious requests and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, yet discourage us to have goals. He should always say much more than he means and always mean much more than he says. He should never run down other pretty women. That would show he has no taste. If we ask him a question about anything, he should give us an answer only about ourselves. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Ideal Man!”
From behind the crowd collected at the girl’s feet, Julian raises his voice, steps forward, and speaks.
“Cecily?” he calls to her, switching to his own paraphrase of The Importance of Being Earnest. “Is that you? The dog cart has been waiting, my dear. Are you ready to leave with me at last?”
With barely a pause the girl squints into the darkness, her hand at her forehead like a visor. “Algernon, is that you? Finally, you’re here. Come quick! Are you planning to stay until next week? I hope so, though my mother will be very cross to discover this is so. She doesn’t like the way you abruptly left me not long ago.”
Julian takes a few steps through the curious crowd. “I left you? You mean, you left me. And I don’t care about your mother, Cecily. I don’t care about anybody in the whole world but you. I love you. You will marry me as you promised, won’t you?”
The girl laughs like a church bell. “Algernon, you silly sausage. Now you want to marry me? Don’t you remember we were already engaged to be married, and then I broke it off with you?”
Two more strides forward. “But why would you do a thing like that, Cecily?”
“Well, it can hardly be called a serious engagement if it’s not broken off at least once. But I forgive you, Algernon.”
He crosses the concrete floor on which people sit and laugh and clap and jumps up onto the wobbling makeshift stage.
For a moment he stands, and she stands, in silence. For a moment it seems as if they both have forgotten their lines. Pulling off his cap, Julian presses it to his chest.
We, the drowned, are rising up for air.
He falls to his knees in front of her, to hide his exhaustion, to show her other things. “What a perfect thing you are, Cecily,” he says, staring up into her baffled face.
The girl looks him over, his suit, his decidedly out-of-time hair, the newsboy at his breast, the dark beard flecked with gray. “Oh, my, Algernon, I see you’ve neglected to shave.”
“Who can shave at a time like this?” Julian says, and the crowd murmurs, hear, hear. “No one is shaving. That’s how you know how shaken the men of London really are.”
Hear, hear, the crowd responds emotionally.
The young woman stares into his bottomless haunted eyes. A breath of animation passes across her face. Coyly she smiles. “You may be unshaven, but aren’t you a little overdressed for the occasion?”
“Why, yes, you’re right, I am a little overdressed,” Julian says. “But I make up for it by being immensely undereducated.”
The people laugh. Julian continues. “Josephine, do you