heartbreak of losing a part on the final audition. So this was the subculture, so often talked about but so often scattered, invisible as bedbugs, of the struggling actor. With the rest of the artists, together with the immigrants, they carried the city on their backs. Eating like hell and suffering miserable colds, serving your ahi tuna, reciting Shakespeare in the shower. Directly behind him stood two girls: one Latina with hoop earrings and curls stiff and frozen and black as tar, and the other dressed, improbably—although nothing was improbable here, if you just looked around—as a princess, a jean jacket thrown over a strapless white gown of silk and organdy that flared widely at the skirt, a silver spangled tiara in her hair. Must be auditioning for princesses, he thought.
The Latina said to the princess, “Why he think he can do me like that? I been good to him, girl! And then he treat me like some ho, like I don’t even go to church and shit.”
“Have Manny whoop his ass,” said the princess.
“What I’m gonna say to Manny gonna make him whoop his boy’s ass like that?”
“That he been saying shit.”
First the acting subculture, then the subculture of women who did not get the respect they deserved from men whose asses should be whooped by Manny. He strained to recall a single exchange—on the street, from the next table over at a restaurant—overheard in all the years he had lived in the city, within the inescapable nexus of babble he had sat in most of his life, and not one came to mind. Not one. Had he never unplugged his ears of the self-involvement that consumed him about work, when he wasn’t sick, or about sickness, when he couldn’t work? Had he never listened?
Later that day he overheard another conversation after ordering food from the Kebab King. The Kebab King was a white portable plastic hut parked down one of the numbered streets in the Forties. Laminated articles stuck to the side of the cart proclaimed the Kebab King the leader of street-vendor cuisine. The menu consisted of three items—lamb, chicken and falafel—spelled out on the front of the hut. He asked for a lamb kebab and gave his money to a small woman wearing a white double-breasted chef’s jacket and a pair of latex gloves. The Kebab Queen, maybe. The Kebab King was in a similar jacket and had his back to her as he tended to diced meat on the sizzling grill.
Tim waited for his order with great anticipation. He was much hungrier than he thought, and this was something he had wanted a long time. There were entire walks whose source of bitterness was not the pain, nor the mystery, nor the ruination, but the simple fact of passing a vendor’s cart as it issued the agonizing aroma of unattainable meat. Walking hungry with no way of stopping played tricks on the mind, as those who die in deserts know when they mistake sand for water. He had fixed for hours on images of charred shanks turning on a spit over a flickering fire and of tearing hocks of roasted meat directly from the bone, blisters of blood sizzling on the surface of the skin. There was nothing civilized about him then. Just the instinct, primordial and naked, for food and fire.
The woman handed him the tightly foiled sandwich with a ration of napkins, and he realized he had no patience for taking it back to the office. He stood against a brick wall and, out of the way of foot traffic, tore away the foil at one end. The sandwich was hot as ore in his hand. His first bite of meat and juice and yogurt sauce and onions and diced pickles nearly made the deprivation of such a thing worth it. The sandy pita was a full-bodied pleasure. He took large bites that forced him to chew dramatically. He was eating the steam itself.
He ordered a second kebab and walked over to the courtyard on the avenue side of the street. There he sat on a smooth roseate ledge that sloped gently toward the sidewalk and watched the other lunchgoers who sat eating around a decommissioned fountain among the tall buildings. As he ate he overheard two men talking. He had passed them on his way to sitting down. They were just on the other side of the ledge from him, reclining against the wall. They were homeless, or lived in a shelter