"He did the unthinkable Italian crime. He walked out on his family. They don't even have a name for this."

"He didn't walk out. They came and got him."

"Keep believing it," Matt said.

He turned on the tap, sponging and rinsing the dishes. The car came back, the car-sized boom box, causing a fuzz storm out there. Nick leaned heavily over the table, lazy-eyed now, brows lowered and mouth open just a chink, forming a lifeless grin. He resembled a man who'd started out drinking hours ago determined to reach a point of particular abandon.

No one spoke. Matt washed and dried a dish, then tried to find the place in the cabinet where it belonged. The car moved off now, finally. Then Nick got up. He took the remaining objects from the table and carried them into the kitchen area. He didn't walk, he moved. It was heavy movement, sluggish and brooding.

"She has her church," Matt said.

"What?"

"She has her church. Her priest."

"We'll get her a new church."

"It won't be the same."

"We don't want it to be the same. We want it to be different. That's the point."

Matt handed him a glass to dry. They worked quietly for a time, doing the dishes and putting them away, finding the right place for each item.

"How's the waste business?"

"Booming. The waste business. Bigger by the minute."

Til bet it is."

"We can't build enough landfills, dig enough gaping caverns."

"You get in there? See the stuff up close?"

"I drive by sometimes. Inspect from a distance."

"You smell the smell?"

"I've done this, yes."

"You see the rats? It must be the Planet of the Rats."

Nick found the place in the cabinet for dessert dishes.

"Did I ever tell you about the rat downtown?"

"I don't think so," Matt said.

"I was thinking about it coming up here. I had a date, a jazz date, we went to see Charles Mingus. I'm trying to think. I think I was living in Palo Alto then, doing textbook work. Came back for a conference. Maybe I was twenty-six. And my date was a German woman, a philosophy student, yes, and a sort of future, now that I think of it, terrorist type, and we went to see Mingus on Hudson Street somewhere, and Mingus stood up there rocking his bass and glaring down at the cash register every time it rang. Mingus was big and he was wide. He looked like three men sharing a suit. And I walked her home, we walked way across town and then downtown and we get to her place, a basement apartment in an old building, and we walk in the door. The second we walk in the door she turns on the light. And then this rat. I'm standing there thinking whatever I'm thinking. Sex is not external to these thoughts. And then this rat. I see this rat go right up the wall. It runs up the wall, a very tremendous rat, and it makes a sound I can still hear, like a whistling corpse. And my date. My date says something in German and picks up something from a table and goes after the rat. I stand there dead still. I'm immobilized by frozen desire. My desire has frozen in my loins. And my date is charging across the room after the rat."

Matt placed a wet cup in the dish towel that Nick held in his hand. Nick could see the pleasure of the kid brother who is invited into the action, given the privileged details of some infamous event. All the more dimensional, the rarer and sweeter when the narrator allows an element of foolery to attach itself to his sober persona, some hapless-ness or slippery shame. All the more intimate and appealing.

"And the rat runs down the other side of the wall and goes zip into the bathroom like a toy on a string, only a thousand times quicker. A phenomenal rat, big and fast, and my date goes right after it, wielding whatever she was wielding that I never actually identified. She turns on the bathroom light and goes right in. I'm feeling frankly a little neglected. But never mind. I stay where I am. I think, What is happening to my jazz date? It's disintegrating into a rat hunt. And then she sticks her head out the door."

Matt studied his brother's face, perceptibly moving his lips to Nick's account, anticipating a word, changing expression when Nick did.

"I am standing as far from the bathroom door as I can stand and still be said to occupy the apartment. I have the front door open. My date is battling the rat in the bathroom and I can hear the rat's sick whistle. And my date sticks her head out the door and says, I am not believing this! I am killing this fucking rat two times already! Rat poison with skulls! And now it is coming back! And she goes back in and resumes the hunt. And I feel totally unworthy. Sleep with her? I have no right being in the same city. I can hear the rat running across the bathtub. Did you ever hear a rat run across a tub? I'll tell you, man, it's awesome."

Matt was strangling with pleasure. He made a sound in his throat, an involuntary quaver. Nick finished the story-the rat squeezing neatly through a vent in the wall, the evening completely queered. They drank another cup of coffee and then his brother found the phone book and called a cab. Nick stood by the window in the living room. He was looking for hookers in spandex tights on the motel roof.

The Italians. They sat on the stoop with paper fans and orangeades. They made their world. They said, Who's better than me? She could never say that. They knew how to sit there and say that and be happy. Thinking back through the decades. She saw a woman fanning herself with a magazine and it seemed like an encyclopedia of breezes, the book of all the breezes that ever blew. The city drugged with heat. Horses perishing in the streets. Who's better than me?

She heard them talking out there.

He wants me to go to the zoo because the animals are real. I told him these are zoo animals. These are animals that live in the Bronx. On television I can see animals in the rain forest or the desert. So which is real and which is fake, which made him laugh.

It would have been easier to believe she deserved it. He left because she was heartless, foolish, angry, she was a bad housekeeper, a bad mother, a cold woman. But she could not invent a reliable plot for any of these excuses.

But it was the sweetest intimacy, his whispered stories of the gamblers and the police, lying in bed the two of them, his days with the garment bosses and bellhops. He made her laugh, telling these stories late at night, love nights, whispering to her afterward, lying close in bed, and even when he was flat-pocket broke he told her funny screwy stories in the night.

She began to drift into sleep now and said a Hail Mary because this is what she always did before she went to sleep. Except she wasn't always sure anymore whether the last Hail Mary she said was a Hail Mary from last night or from two minutes ago and she said this prayer and said this prayer because she mixed up the time and didn't want to go to sleep without being sure.

She had more material things than most people she knew, thanks to sons who provided. She had nicer furniture, a safer building, doctors left and right. They made her go to a gynecologist, with Janet calling and then Marian calling, women of the world hooray. But she still couldn't say, Who's better than me?

She got the Italian without the family, the boy who just showed up, like a shadow off a wall. She didn't mind that at first. She liked it. She didn't want relatives turning up with pastry in white boxes. She liked his slimness, his lack of attachments. But then she began to see what this meant. The only thing preserved in the man's dark body was a kid in empty space, the shifty boy on the verge of using up his luck.

Then she slept and then the car music woke her up. She heard their voices again, the cupboard doors shutting.

She did not show her love. She showed it but not enough. She was not good at that. But it was partly his doing. The more she loved him, the scareder he got. He was scared in his eyes, telling funny stories in the night.