Free Wolf Point by Edward Falco

loved better than waking up being fucked. He touched Jenny’s thigh lightly, but as soon as thethought of sex moved out of the realm of the hypothetical and toward the realm of the actual, a voice in the back of his head laughed at him and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. This girl was twenty-three, younger than his own daughter. Considerably younger. Did he believe for one second that she could be genuinely attracted to him? No, he didn’t. With that acknowledgment, his old friend waved good-bye and disappeared. T buttoned up, tucked the quilt around Jenny, and got up to open a window.
    Outside, the trees were trembling in a steady wind, and the river seethed under lines of white foam. He opened the window an inch and then stood a long time with his arms crossed on the windowsill looking out at the night. He tried hard to concentrate on the physical world, the world of trees and rocks, of wind and water. He tried to feel himself as a creature alive in the physical world, an animate being in the phenomenal world, someone to whom anything might happen and capable of setting into effect an infinite sequence of actions. Tom Walker, a human being alive for a stunningly brief span of years on a small planet circling a medium-sized star in an unimaginably massive universe. He tried hard to feel the gift of being alive right then at that moment—and he did. He felt it and was grateful, and was able to hold on to the feeling for a second or two before his thoughts shifted to Alicia, his most recent ex, whom he had met some twenty-four years ago when she was almost exactly the same age as the young woman currently sleeping in front of the fire across the room from him. Moving from one mode of perception to the other, from themetaphysical to the personal, was like walking out of a beautiful countryside and into a prison, and yet he couldn’t help himself. He stared out a cabin window at the Saint Lawrence River on a windy and extraordinary night and thought his pedestrian thoughts about his own life.
    He had met Alicia a little more than a year after Brooke left him. He had an apartment downtown, just outside the old meat-packing district, with a view of the Hudson, and with the help of some friends he knew through Brooke, he had invested enough money in an Off-Broadway play to earn a producer listing, which in turn earned him the right to quietly observe rehearsals. He was still in his early thirties then, and hardly wealthy, but his various businesses were doing well, and to Alicia, he realized, he must have appeared to be rich. She was twenty-two, a little more than a year out of SUNY Purchase, with a BFA, an eight-month-old son, and no child support from the father, who was still in college. She lived with her parents in Massapequa, Long Island, and commuted into the city to work days in a coffee shop and nights on the play while leaving her son, Evan, to be raised by his grandparents. She was a tall woman, taller than T when she wore her hair up, and she had a dancer’s body, muscular and lithe. It wasn’t lost on T that physically she was Brooke’s opposite. The contrast with Brooke was striking in every way. Where Brooke was flighty and unstable, Alicia was focused and resolute. Where Brooke never seemed to know what she wanted or even why she should want anything, which T attributed to her coming from a wealthy family and inheriting wealth, Alicia was superb atfocusing on a goal and doing whatever needed to be done to achieve it. When T met her, she was working eight-hour shifts at the coffee shop, grabbing a quick bite to eat and then taking the subway downtown, where she would rehearse all night, sometimes into the early hours of the morning, before catching a ride home with the director, who also lived out on the island. Once T got to know her a little, he started giving her rides home, and they quickly discovered the similarity of their circumstances. T was still principally living in Huntington, Long