"Mike, tell me you're not gonna charge me for the time you guys spent eating ziti."

The men enjoyed that. He went back to the table and finished the game with Stevie and Ray. They wanted to know what he'd been talking about with the guys at the counter.

He thought of a half-ass joke but then said nothing.

He was grateful for the time, genuinely, but he didn't think he had to accept the logic of the argument. The logic, he decided, did not impress him.

They played cards down there, pinochle, and drank homemade wine, in the room under the shoemaker's shop, off the dim passageway that led out to the yards.

Bronzini looked on, sitting in when someone left but otherwise a kibitzer, unmeddlesome, content to savor the company and try the wine, sometimes good, sometimes overfermented, better used to spike a salad.

He was in a hurry to be an old man, Klara told him. Why else sit here with these elders of the streets, some of them nearly twice his age, spending whole afternoons in argument and aimless talk.

Outside in the deep slow swelter, cats were asleep in the shade and people keeping to the sides of buildings if they were out at all, moving dazed in the unexpected heat.

Down here in the basement room it was dry and quiet and stone-cool, quiet except for the voices of course, and he liked the voices, loud, crude, funny, often powerfully opinionated, all speechmakers these men, actors, declaimers, masters of insult, reaching for some moment of transcendence.

John the Super loosed a bullfrog fart.

He told them about the garbage he used to handle when he worked as a janitor downtown, temporary, in a large apartment building, elevators, doormen, dry cleaning delivered, taxis left and right.

Mannaggia VAmerica.

This goddamn country has garbage you can eat, garbage that's better to eat than the food on the table in other countries. They have garbage here you can furnish your house and feed your kids.

They played and bid and made sissing noises to acknowledge the bountiful folly of clothes in the garbage that are good enough to wear.

Albert told them about the ancient Mayans. These people did not bury their dead with gleaming jewelry and other valuable objects. They used old broken things. They put cracked vases in with the dead, or chipped cups and tarnished bracelets. They used the dead as a convenient means of garbage disposal.

This story satisfied the cardplayers. It was very satisfactory. Disrespect for the dead was a nice cruel satisfying joke, especially to men of a certain age. A joke on the dead was a beautiful joke. A joke with balls.

Albert felt isolated here in the safest of ways, the slap of the cards, the men making theatrical bids, the wine seeping into his system, and he knew finally why there was something familiar about these lost afternoons under the shoemaker's.

Like childhood, he thought. Those bedridden days when he was islanded in sheets and pillows, surrounded by books, by chess pieces, deliciously sick at times, a fever that sent him inward, sea-sweats and dreams with runny colors, lonely but not unhappy, the room a world, the safe place of imagination.

Liguori didn't take wine anymore, the printer, because he had a liver condition. He talked about the strolling musicians who used to come around, a fiddler and a trumpet player, and how people wrapped coins in paper and threw them from the windows.

Quantasold'?

His wife used to say, How much is it gonna cost me to listen to this cafone play his fiddle? But they didn't come around anymore. They had liver conditions, or half a stomach between them, or the noise of traffic, Albert said, made music futile.

The men spoke mostly English but used the dialect when an idea needed a push or shove into a more familiar place. And odd how Albert, barely nearing forty, could feel his old-manness within him, here in particular, as the voices took him back to earliest memory, the same slurred words, the dropped vowels, the vulgate, so that English was the sound of the present and Italian took him backwards, the merest intonation, a language marked inexhaustibly by the past.

Someone was evicted, put out on the street, chairs, tables, bed, right around the corner-the bed, John said, the super. Frame, spring, mattress, pillows, out on the sidewalk.

Porca miseria.

What a wretchedness it was, what a complete humiliation of the spirit. You're like a museum of poverty People walk by and look. The bed, the plates and glasses, the suitcase with your clothes, a pair of old shoes in a paper bag. Imagine shoes. And they walk by and look. Who says this, who says that, who sits in a chair, who points from a car. They should be ashamed to look. A man's shoes on the sidewalk.

There was always the neighborhood and who was leaving and who was moving in, showing up on the fringes. Tizzoons. A word Albert wished they wouldn't use. A southern dialect word, a corruption, a slur, an invective, from tizzo, he assumed, a firebrand or smoldering coal, and broadened to human dimensions in tizzone d'inferno, scoundrel, villain. But the word they used suggested a hellishness, a fiendishness that made it more unspeakable, in a way, than nigger. But they spoke it, of course, these men, these immigrants or sons of immigrants, the hordes who threaten society's peaceful sleep, who are always showing up and moving in. Tizzoon. They masked the word. They narrowed their eyes and barely moved their lips. But they spoke it, they half hissed the word in a way that made Albert wish he hadn't heard.

Spadafora told them about the washing machine that was automatic, where the woman sets a control and walks out the door and the machine washes, rinses, spins, dries, shuts off-everything automatic.

They shook their heads and made sissing noises and muttered casual curses, baffled at their luck in being here, amazed and confused, searching a way to train their skepticism on the wonders that unfolded daily.

The wine was not so drinkable this time. It was the shoemaker's own wine, Guido, and this was not wine weather anyway, and Albert wanted to be more responsible. He wanted to be a dry wise soul (Her-aclitus), less slipshod and indecisive, more willing to see into the core of a complicated matter.

He needed to take a leak and the super told him there was a utility sink he could use and gave him directions through the maze of passages.

He went past storage rooms and empty garbage cans. Then he came out into a courtyard and saw the door the super had described and went into the next building.

For a long time he wanted to believe that she had ambitions on his behalf. But now he wasn't sure of this. He thought she wanted him to campaign for department head, for assistant principal, make the moves, play the game, buy a car, buy a house. And he thought these ambitions were going unfulfilled, which made her angry and distant at times. But now he wasn't sure.

He walked through the cellarways under rows of copper piping. He found the utility closet and peed in the sink. His childhood was back there, in the voices of his mother and father, guarded, suspicious, scared at times, and in the sissing noises they made to mark distrust of the unknown world around them.

He heard a radio playing round the next bend and decided to follow the sound, music, sweetness, strings, his head clear and his bladder empty, the ever gregarious Albert, curious to see what sort of company he might encounter here.

He turned the corner and stopped next to a discarded table with a missing leg.

George Manza, George the Waiter, sat in a chair in a shabby room. There was something about him. He was not dozing or deep-thinking but there was something. He was awake but unresponsive. And there was something that kept Albert from speaking.