Free Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison Page A

me and silently helped me with my coat, then hung my scarf about my neck. She was spectacularly beautiful.
    â€œOh, Caroline Crowley …” I lurched sideways accidentally.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œAll men are dogs, and I am one.”
    She smiled this away. Then she reached up with one hand, held my cheek with her warm fingers, and kissed my other
cheek, slowly, with a breath. “I’m going to call you,” she whispered. Then she kissed me again. “Okay?”
    â€œOkay,” I murmured, feeling that she had outsmarted me.
    â€œAre you all right?”
    â€œI am … I am mystified, Caroline. I’m just—” My lips had that buzzy drunken feeling about them, and I fell against the door frame. I was now suddenly so drunk that I’d have to get a cab home and retrieve my car later. I felt like a fool. “But then again,” I slurred, “that may be your intention.”
    Twenty minutes later, my cab pulled up outside my brick wall downtown. I always get my keys out before opening the door, because once the cab pulls away, the street is dark and anybody could walk up to you. Even drunk, I had that New York paranoia. Only after I shut the gate behind me, pulling against the weight of it and turning the dead bolt, did I relax. The city, for now, remained on the other side of the wall. But gate or no, Caroline Crowley and the history of her doomed husband had now entered my life.

S ix-thirty A.M., and a drunken hand (my hand) under instructions from a drunken brain (my brain) crabbed over to the phone next to the bed, lunged for the receiver, which it flipped off the hook, and then felt for the last automatic-dial button, marked BOBBY D., which the drunken index finger (mine) then pressed. As the phone rang, the hand lifted the receiver from the floor, while the drunken brain thought of Caroline Crowley, the most beautiful woman I had never fucked, while the ears, not drunk, waited for Bob Dealy, the overnight guy on the city desk, a man so cadaverous that he looked like he drank gasoline and ate what the cat sicked up—which perhaps was to be expected if you spent each night for twenty years sitting in a newsroom listening to the police radio, making calls to the precincts, reading a dozen papers from around the country, eating doughnuts and, with them, no small amount of newsprint.
    â€œDesk, Dealy.”
    â€œWhat you got, Bobby?”
    â€œAah, Porter, we have a collision between a taxi and a philosopher on lower Broadway. We got the recurrent gentleman with no name supine in an alley in the one-oh-four, and aah, in the seven-oh, we got two young pharmaceutical executives of the Nubian persuasian shot in the head. But it didn’t bother them much. In Brooklyn we got somebody who robbed a bank with a jack-hammer—tore out the night-deposit
box. In Midtown we got two philosophers who tried to ride a fire truck that was making a run. We also—hold on—”
    Now the drunken brain discerned other voices. Lisa and the kids were downstairs. Spoon and bowl. All kids love cereal. Love her. Good with the kids. Looks good enough, swims a mile every other day, could screw me dead anytime she wants. Loves it from behind. Why? The action goes in farther, among other reasons. Loves it. Don’t throw the eggie! Mommy, I can’t eat my cereal. Sweetie, just eat it. But Tommy didn’t eat his cereal. He’s eating eggs, sweetie. She’d nursed the kids so long they ruined her tits. Sucked them off, basically. Wan juicee. Want some juice? Juicee! Wan juicee, Mama. Eat your cereal, Sally.
    â€œYeah, Porter, also we got a diving champion—”
    I opened my eyes. “What bridge?”
    â€œYou sound funny. You sick?”
    â€œNah. What bridge?”
    â€œBrooklyn.”
    â€œAnything?”
    â€œConstruction guy,” Bobby wheezed. “Broke his leg at work, couldn’t buy the groceries no more, girlfriend went shopping