Free Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison

about twenty-five hobble into the room on crutches. She was in tremendous pain and was waved into the doctor’s office. The nurse accidentally left the reception-area door open, and I was just able to hear the woman’s desperate request: “Please give me the shot.” An indistinct male voice responded. “Please,” the woman wept, “I have to dance tonight.”) Caroline Crowley was not a stripper or a model or an actress, not so far as I knew, but I could only guess that she had once brought the same sense of purpose with her when she came to New York, that she had arrived in the city to have a dialogue with fate, and that she knew, as any genuinely beautiful woman knows, that the terms of the conversation would include her face and teeth and breasts and legs.
    With these thoughts I drained off my drink and then indulged another. That made five or perhaps six or maybe even seven. I have been drunk many times in my life and enjoyed most of those times, but never has drunkenness revealed in me some hidden streak of self-destruction; I do not drive while drunk, I do not leap from windows or pick fights in bars. While drunk, I am incapable of the fatal gesture. This does not mean that I don’t make mistakes, only that my most disastrous errors in judgment occur when I am not drunk, when, presumably, I am lucid. So, in that moment, when Caroline Crowley, the lonely, beautiful widow, stood before me, clutching her record of the violent destruction of her husband and seeming for all the world ready to be embraced and kissed and plunged into voluptuous copulation—the image of the homeless couple fucking feverishly outside in the cold returned to me—in that moment, I chose to remember my own sleeping wife, with her arm thrown across my empty pillow, and this gave me the further will to stand, quite unsteadily, and say, “I’m sorry your husband was killed or died or whatever happened to him, Caroline. I imagine it was a terrible shock, and it seems to me that you’re still haunted by it. I know we’ve been joking around all evening, but let me say
… let me just say that if it’s possible to suddenly have a certain affection for someone in only one evening, only a few hours, then I feel that way toward you, Caroline, and I am saddened to think what it must have been like to lose your husband. Every week, just about, I talk to people who’ve just lost someone they love, and it always saddens me, Caroline, it always—it always reminds me that we, all of us, are—that it all—can be lost. You are beautiful and about twenty-eight years old and should have all good things come to you. If I were not married, I would—no, I will avoid—maybe better to … say that perhaps you sought me out tonight because you figured that, hack tabloid columnist that I am, that I’ve seen an unnatural amount of human destruction and might therefore offer you some useful words of solace or perspective. But I assure you”—and here I desired to touch her cheek with my fingers, just for a moment, by way of comfort, as I would comfort my own daughter—“that I’m unequal to the task. I’m as mystified and terrified by death as the next person, Caroline. I can’t really say anything useful …in such—such a disabled state … except that I suggest that you embrace life, that you venture forth and marry your fiancé, if he’s a good guy, and have faith that some losses are recoverable, that life has, finally—excuse me, please, I am very drunk—that life actually has … has some kind of meaning.”
    She said nothing, and instead watched me with her lips pressed in amusement, and I wish now that I had understood it to be quite an unfunny sort of amusement. She saw me struggling against myself. I stood and moved toward the door, watching my shoes to make sure they went where I expected them to go. She followed