He did not shave last night before bed, as is his custom, but he doesn’t dare try just now. He would probably cut his throat with the straight razor, shaky as he is.

While he makes coffee, he suddenly feels guilty about Marie-Louise. My God. If he feels this bad, what will she feel like? Poor kid.

The poor kid chatters with animation as she sits on the sofa, curled up in Lucille’s pink robe. He answers in monosyllables, turning his head to look at her; it hurts when he moves his eyes.

“What was that licorice stuff we drank?” she asks. “It was good.”

“Ouzo,” he mutters.

“What?”

“Ouzo!”

“Hey, what’s wrong? Are you mad about something?”

“No.”

“You’re sure you’re not mad? I mean, you seem…”

“I’m fine.”

“Say… you’re not sick, are you?”

“Sick? Me?” He manages a chuckle.

“I just thought… I mean, you told me to watch out for that… what’s it called again?”

“Ou-zo. Look, I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

She looks at him sideways with a childish leer. “I don’t blame you. You have a right to feel tired.”

He smiles wanly. He cannot quite forgive her for being so healthy and buoyant, but she does look pretty with the sunlight in her hair like that.

She goes into the bedroom to find her hairbrush. When she returns, she is humming one of the Greek songs, doing a little sliding step and dipping down, then snapping her head up on the rise. One of his eyes closes involuntarily with the snap of her head. She plunks down on the sofa and begins to brush her hair. “Hey, we’ll have to go out for breakfast. I told you that I didn’t buy any groceries. I spent all the money on clothes. Where will we go?”

“I’m not particularly hungry; are you?”

“Hm-m! I could eat a horse! And look what a beautiful day it is!”

The glitter of the park stings his eyes. But yes, it is a beautiful day. Perhaps a walk in the cold air would help.

With few places open on a Sunday morning, they take breakfast in one of the variété shops common to this quartier, although slowly disappearing with the invasion of large cut-rate establishments. Such shops sell oddments and orts: candy, bagels, teddy bears, Chap Stick, ginger ale, jigsaw puzzles, aspirin, newspapers, cigarettes, contraceptives, kites, everything but what you need at any given moment. Its window is piled with dusty, fly-specked articles that are never sold and never rearranged. In the jumble, knitted snow caps and suntan lotion rest side by side, one or the other always out of season, except in spring, when they both are.

The proprietor moves a stack of newspapers to the floor to make room for them at the short, cracked marble counter. He has a reputation in the district for being a “type,” and he works at maintaining it. Although his counter service is usually limited to stale, thick coffee in the winter and soft drinks in summer, he can accommodate light orders, if he happens to have cheese or eggs in the refrigerator of his living space behind the shop. They ask for eggs, toast, and coffee, which the proprietor fixes up on his stove in the back room, all the while singing to himself and maintaining an animated conversation in English, his voice raised, from the other room.

“Is it sunny enough for you, Lieutenant? But I’d bet you a million bucks it won’t last. If it don’t snow tonight, then tomorrow will be the same as yesterday—shitbrindle clouds and no sun.” He sticks his head out through the curtain. “Sorry, lady.” He disappears back and calls, “Hey, do you want these sunny side up?

Hey, you remember that one, Lieutenant? Oh-oh! I broke one. How about having them scrambled? They’re better for you that way, anyway. Egg whites ain’t good for your heart. I read that somewhere.

You’ve got to remember that one, Lieutenant. Bing Crosby.” He comes from the back room, carefully balancing two plates, which he sets down on the cracked counter. “There you go! Two orders of scrambled. Enjoy. Yeah, Bing Crosby sang that in one of his films. I think he was a priest. Say, do you remember Bobby Breen, Lieutenant?

That was a great movie. He sang that sitting on a hay wagon. You know, that ain’t easy, singing while you’re on a hay wagon. Yeah, Bobby Breen and Shirley Temple. Wonder whatever became of Shirley Temple. They don’t make movies like that any more. All this violence shit. Sorry, lady. Hey! You don’t have any forks! No wonder you ain’t eating. Here! Geez! I’d forget my ass if it wasn’t tied on. Sorry, lady. Here’s your coffee. Hey, did you read this morning about that guy getting stabbed in an alley just off the Main? How about that? It’s getting so you can’t take a walk around the block anymore without getting stabbed by some son of a bitch. Sorry, lady. Things ain’t what they used to be. Right, Lieutenant? And the prices these days!

Don’t you believe it! What can you get free these days? Advice. Cancer maybe. It’s a miracle a man can stay in business with the prices. Everybody out to fuck his neighbor… oh, lady, I am sorry! Geez, I’m really sorry.”

As they walk slowly along a gravel path through the park, her hand in the crook of his arm, she asks, “What was that mec jabbering about?”

“Oh, nothing. It never occurred to him that you don’t speak English.”

The crisp air has cleared LaPointe’s headache away, and the little food has settled his stomach. The thin wintery sunshine warms the back of his coat pleasantly, but he can feel a sudden ten– or fifteen-degree drop in temperature when he steps into a shadow. The touch of this sun, dazzling but insubstantial, reminds him of whiter mornings on his grandparents’ farm, the soil of which was so rocky and poor that the family joke said the only things that grew there were potholes, which one could split into quarters and sell to the big farmers to be driven into the ground as post holes. All the LaPointes, aunts, cousins, in-laws, came to the farm for Christmas. And there were a lot of LaPointes, because they were Catholic and part Indian, and you can’t lock the door of a teepee. The children slept three or four to a bed, and sometimes the smaller ones were put across the bottom to fit more in. Claude LaPointe and his cousins fought and played games and pinched under the covers, but if anyone cried out with joy or pain, then the parents would stop their pinochle games downstairs and shout up that someone was going to get his ass smacked if he didn’t cut it out and go to sleep! And all the kids held their breath and tried not to laugh, and they all sputtered out at once. One of the cousins thought it was funny to spit into the air through a gap in his teeth, and when the others hid under the blankets, he would fart.

On Christmas morning they were allowed into the parlor, musty-smelling but very clean because it was kept closed, except for Sundays, or when the priest visited, or when someone had died and was laid out in a casket supported on two saw horses hidden under a big white silk sheet rented from the undertaker.

The parlor was open, too, for Christmas. Kids opening presents on the floor. Christmas tree weeping needles onto a sheet. A pallid winter sun coming in the window, its beam capturing floating motes of dust.