“I’ve been in the Army all my life,” Marco said. “We keep moving. I was born in New Hampshire.”

“I went to a girls’ camp once on Lake Francis.”

“Well. That’s away north. What’s your name?”

“Eugénie.”

“Pardon?”

“No kidding. I really mean it. And with that crazy French pronunciation.”

“It’s pretty.”

“Thank you.”

“Your friends call you Jenny?”

“Not yet they haven’t.”

“I think it’s a nice name.”

“You may call me Jenny.”

“But what do your friends call you?”

“Rosie.”

“Why?”

“My full name—the first name—is Eugénie Rose. I always favored Rosie, of the two names, because it smells like brown soap and beer. It’s the kind of a name that is always worn by the barmaid who always gets whacked across the behind by draymen. My father used to say it was a portly kind of a name, and with me being five feet nine he always figured I had a better chance of turning out portly than fragile, which is really and truly the way a girl using the name Eugénie would have to be.”

“Still, when I asked you your name, you said Eugénie.”

“It is quite possible that I was feeling more or less fragile at that instant.”

“I never could figure out what more or less meant.”

“Nobody can.”

“Are you Arabic?”

“No.”

He held out his hand to be taken in formal greeting. “My name is Ben. It’s really Bennet. I was named after Arnold Bennet.”

“The writer?”

“No. A lieutenant colonel. He was my father’s commanding officer at the time.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Marco.”

“Major Marco. Are you Arabic?”

“No, but no kidding, I was sure you were Arabic. I would have placed your daddy’s tents within twelve miles of the Hoggar range in the central Sahara. There’s a town called Janet in there and a tiny little place with a very rude name that I couldn’t possibly repeat even if you had a doctorate in geography. When the sun goes down and the rocks, which have been heated so tremendously all day, are chilled suddenly by the night, which comes across the desert like flung, cold, black stout, it makes a salvo like a hundred rifles going off in rapid fire. The wind is called the khamseen, and after a flood throws a lot of power down a mountainside the desert is reborn and millions and millions of white and yellow flowers come to bloom all across the empty desolation. The trees, when there are trees, have roots a hundred feet long. There are catfish in the waterholes. Think of that. Did you know that? Sure. Some of them run ten, twelve inches. Everywhere else in the Arab world the woman is a beast of burden. Among the Tuareg, the woman is queen, and the Hoggar are the purest of the Tuareg. They have a ceremony called ahal, a sort of court of love where the woman reigns with her beauty, her wit, or the quality of her blood. They have enormous chivalry, the Tuareg. If a man wants to say ‘I love!’ he will say ‘I am dying of love.’ I have dreamed many times of a woman I have never seen and will never see because she died in 1395, and to this day the Tuareg recall her in their poetry, in their ahals, telling of her beauty, intelligence, and her wit. Her name was Dassine oult Yemma, and her great life was deeply punctuated by widely known love affairs with the great warriors of her time. I thought you were she. For just an instant, back there in that car a little while ago, I thought you were she.”

His voice had gotten more and more rapid and his eyes were feverish. She had held his hand tightly in both of hers as he had spoken, ever since he had introduced himself. They stared at each other.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You became one of my best and bravest thoughts,” he told her. “I thank you.” The taut, taut band around his head had loosened. “Are you married?”

“No. You?”

“No. What’s your last name?”

“Cheyney. I am a production assistant for a man named Justin who had two hits last season. I live on Fifty-fourth Street, a few doors from the Museum of Modern Art, of which I am a tea-privileges member, no cream. I live at Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth Street, Three B. Can you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Eldorado nine, two six three two. Can you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“You look so tired. Apartment Three B. Are you stationed in New York? Is stationed the right word? Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth Street.”

“I’m not exactly stationed in New York. I have been stationed in Washington but I got sick and I have a long leave now and I’m going to spend it in New York.”

“Eldorado nine, two-six-three-two.”

“I stay with a friend of mine, a newspaperman. We were in Korea together.” Marco ran a wet hand over his face and began to hum “La Seine.” He had found the source of the sound of the open A. It was far inside this girl and it was in the sound of the name Dassine oult Yemma. He couldn’t get the back of his hand away from his mouth. He had had to shut his eyes. He was so tired. He was so tired. She took his hand gently away from his mouth. “Let’s sit down,” she said. “I want you to put your head on my shoulder.” The train lurched and he almost fell, but she caught and held him, then she led the way into the other car where there were plenty of seats.

Raymond’s apartment was on the extreme west coast of the island where firemen had heavy bags under their eyes from piling out four and five times a night to push sirens to brownstone houses where nobody had any time to do anything about too many bone-weary Puerto Ricans living in one room. It was a strip of city too dishonest to admit it was a slum, or rather, in all of the vastness of the five boroughs of metropolis there was a strip of city, very tiny, which was not a slum, and this was the thin strip that was photographed and its pictures sent out across the world until all the world and the minuscule few who lived in that sliver of city thought that was New York, and neither knew or cared about the remainder of the six hundred square miles of flesh and brick. Here was the ripe slum of the West Side where the city had turned so bad that at last thirteen square blocks of it had had to be torn down before the rats carried off the babies. New York, New York! It’s a wonderful town! The west side of the island was rich in façades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis. Central Park West was all front and faced a glorious park betrayed only now and then by bands of chattering faggots auctioning bodies and by an excessive population of emotion-caparisoned people in the somewhat temporary-looking sanitariums on so many of its side streets. Columbus and Amsterdam avenues were the streets of the drunks, where the murders were done in the darkest morning hours, where there were an excessive number of saloons and hardware stores. They were connected by trains of brownstone houses whose fronts were riotously colored morning and evening and all day on Sunday by bursts and bouquets of Puerto Ricans, and beyond Amsterdam was Broadway, the bawling, flash street, the fleshy, pig-eyed part of the city that wore lesions of neon and incandescent scabs, pustules of lights and color in suggestively luetic lycopods, illuminating littered streets, filth-clogged streets that could never be cleansed because when one thousand hands cleaned, one million hands threw dirt upon the streets again. Broadway was patrolled by strange-looking pedestrians, people who had grabbed the wrong face in the dark when someone had shouted “Fire!” and were now out roaming the streets, desperate to find their own. For city block after city block on Broadway it seemed that only food was sold. Beyond that was West End Avenue, a misplaced street bitter on its own memories, lost and bewildered, seeking some Shaker Heights, desperately genteel behind an apron of shabby bricks. Here was the limbo of the lower middle class where God the Father, in the form of sunlight, never showed His face. Raymond lived beyond that, on Riverside Drive, another front street of large, grand apartments that had become cabbage-sour furnished rooms which faced the river and an excessive amount of squalor on the Jersey shore. All together, the avenues and streets proved by their decay that the time of the city was long past, if it had ever existed, and the tall buildings, end upon end upon end, were so many extended fingers beckoning the Bomb.