he decided at last; he knew of men whose wives and teenage daughters had private phones (on which they cooed with their lovers) while their men made calls on the many phones of the financial firms that bore their names; he grew suspicious of men who used their first initials and middle names because he found them all to be bill collectors, or lawyers whose bsns had the same address as their rsdnce, or city marshals who also sold used furniture; he learned that almost everyone named Singleton and everyone named Singletary lived in the northern black city where the men had for first names the names of past presidents and the women had gemlike names, pearl and ruby and opal and jewel, with a proud Mrs. before it—he imagined them large and dark and glowing in small apartments, alone with many clean children. From the proud locksmith who used so many A's in his tiny shop's name that he came first to Archimedes Zzzyandottie who came last (an old scholar who lived alone, reading Greek newspapers in a shabby apartment) he knew them all. Beneath his sliding bar a tiny name and number would rise up like flotsam borne up a beach by waves and tell its story; Smoky listened, looked at his card, found them the same, and was turning down the card even as the distorting glass threw up the next tale. The reader next to him sighed tragically. The ceiling coughed. The ceiling laughed, loudly. Everyone looked up.
A young man who had just been hired had laughed.
"I've just found," he said, "a listing here for the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club." He could barely finish it for laughing, and Smoky was amazed that the silence of every other proofreader there didn't hush him. "Don't you get it?" The young man appealed to Smoky. "It sure would be a noisy bridge." Smoky suddenly laughed too, and their laughter rose to the ceiling and shook hands there.
His name was George Mouse; he wore wide suspenders to his wide pants, and when the day was done, he threw around himself a great woolen cloak whose collar trapped his long black hair, so that he must reach back and flip it out, like a girl. He had a hat like Svengali's, and eyes like him too—dark-shadowed, compelling, and humorous. It wasn't a week later that he was fired, to the relief of every pair of bifocals in the white room, but by then he and Smoky had become, as only Smoky in the whole world it seemed could any longer say with all seriousness, fast friends.
A City Mouse
With George as his friend, Smoky began a course of mild debauchery, a little drink, a little drugs; George changed his clothes, and his patterns of speech, to a City tattersall, and introduced him to Girls. In not too long a while, Smoky's anonymity became clothed, like the Invisible Man in his bandages; people stopped bumping into him on the street or sitting on his lap in buses without apology—which he had attributed to his being very vaguely present to most people.
To the Mouse family—who lived in the last tenanted building of a block of buildings the first City Mouse had built and which they still mostly owned—he was at least present; and more than for his new hat and his new lingo he thanked George for that family of highly distinguishable and loudly loving folk. In the midst of their arguments, jokes, parties, walkings-out-in-bedroom-slippers, attempts at suicide and noisy reconciliations, he sat unnoticed for hours; hut then Uncle Ray or Franz or Mom would look up startled and say, "Smoky's here!" and he would smile.
"Do you have country cousins?" Smoky asked George once as they waited out a snowstorm over café-royale in George's favorite old hotel bar. And indeed he did.
At First Sight
"They're very religious," George told him with a wink as he led him away from the giggly girls to introduce him to their parents, Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater.
"Not a practicing doctor," said the Doctor, a wrinkled man with woolly hair and the unsmiling cheerfulness of a small animal. He was not as tall as his wife, whose generously-fringed and silken shawl trembled as she shook Smoky's hand and asked him to call her Sophie; she in turn wasn't as tall as her daughters. "All the Dales were tall," she said, looking up and inward as though she could see them all somewhere above her. She had given her surname