"This is my wife."

"We don't see many women," Tommy said like a Buddhist monk in a backcountry compound, polite and wise.

"It's a wonder you see anybody. Because frankly who would come here?" Marvin said. "You have to make the place halfway presentable."

"Presentable." Nice word. "Marvin, think. What am I selling here? I'm not selling housewares in a regional mall."

He was a smart guy and would-be likable but ageless in the face, which disconcerted Marvin because you like to know how old a man you're talking to.

"What did you sell today?"

"You're the first people in the shop."

"Don't look so smug."

Something's staring you straight in the face.

The largest shop was at street level, a dozen men standing around, furtive, in raincoats, looking at old copies of National Geographic. These were used magazines, used and handled, lived-with, and the address labels were attached, machine-stamped and ink-smudged and skin-greasy, and printed on the labels were the names and addresses of real people out there in magazine America, and the men in raincoats stood by tables and bins and read the labels and leafed through the magazines, heads never lifting.

A man bought a magazine and left quickly, slipping it under his coat.

Marvin did not think these men were interested in photos of wolf packs on the tundra at sunset. It was something else they sought, a forgotten human murmur, maybe, a sense of families in little heartland houses with a spaniel flop-eared on the rug, a sense of snug innocence and the undiscovered world outside, the vast geographic. A pornography of nostalgia, maybe, or was it something else completely?

And was there a back room, because isn't there always a back room, another splintering of desire, a little more refined and personalized, and in the back room weren't the magazines cased in acetate folders, maybe these were rare issues or rare labels, or maybe the folders themselves were the fetish items here, dust-veneered, handled, nearly opaque some of them, a dullish sort of plastic with a faint odor and prophylactic feel, like condoms for reading matter, and maybe there's another room where you need to whisper a password and this is the room with folders only, empty folders, handled a thousand times, and Eleanor was completely creeped out by this place, it was more than she'd bargained for, raincoated men with National Geographies, furtively thumbing the labels.

Across the street they saw a tall woman's shop, called Long Tall Sally, but not for dresses and coats. Fantasy Enhancements, the sign read. Books, movies, appliances-tall women only.

You see a few funny things in some off-street on a rainy night and you wonder why they seem significant. Marvin thought there was something here that might be an early sign of some great force beginning to tremble awake, he didn't know what exactly, he didn't know

"The revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously."

The remark had an impact. Marvin felt a thing in his chest like a Korean in pajamas who's crushing a brick with the striking surface of his hand. But then he thought, How can I not be serious? What's not to be serious about? What could I take more seriously than this? And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

He knew Eleanor wanted to leave. He knew Eleanor was thinking, At least Marvin keeps the basement neat.

There was something he had to buy first. A small empty box semi-discarded in a corner, marked Spalding Official National League Number 1-it once held a new baseball, many years ago. And he would save it for the time when the old used bruised ball came into his possession, if and when.

He reached up to pay the man. Hung on the wall was a photograph of President Carter and his daughter what's-her-name standing in the Rose Garden with Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, a strained smile on every face.

They went out to the street. A woman in rags pushed her belongings in a shopping cart, seemingly bent on a specific destination. Was there a family waiting, was she a commuter of the future, did people live unknown to us in the crawlspaces of the what, the infrastructure, down the tunnels and under the bridge approaches?

"Tommy looks so happy. How is that possible, living in the dark?"

"Pick up your feet, Marv. You're healthy, not sick."

"Alone in that dungeon every day."

"Does he have a wife and children?"

"I don't know. Who would ask? That's not a question we ask in the memorabilia field."

"Does he enjoy the amenities, do you think, of our basic way of life?"

"You say that word terrific."

"Does he have a little backyard where he grows Jersey tomatoes every summer?"

"I look at him I don't think I see a tomato looking back."

"Does he take his bride on business trips?"

"I've been here since noon. These other merchants don't open till very late."

"Since noon. And no one."

"How interesting to see a woman," Tommy said.

Eleanor stood motionless, maybe part paralyzed by her exotic status.

She said, "Don't you have to give people an incentive to buy? Not that it's any of my."

"An incentive." What a novel idea. "The incentive is within, I think. These materials have no esthetic interest. They're discolored and crumbling. Old paper, that's all it is. My customers come here largely for the clutter and mess. It's a history they feel they're part of."

Marvin said to Eleanor, "I always thought the people who preserved these old things, baseball things, I always thought they lived in the East. I thought this is where all the remembering is done. Tommy is the first collector I found anywhere west of Pittsburgh."

Tommy had a smile so slight and fleeting it could only be photographed on film stock developed by NASA. His little knickknack face floated in the gloom and Marvin had a childlike urge to reach up and touch it, just to see if it felt like his, the rough dull surface he washed and shaved every day.

"Did you find your man?" Tommy said.

"I found my ship. The man, forget about."

"You must give it up."

"Who's talking?"

"You can't precisely locate the past, Marvin. Give it up. Retire it. For your own good."

"Who's talking?"

"Free yourself," Tommy said.

"You sit here inhaling dust like what kind of statue."

"Equestrian," Eleanor said.

"An equestrian statue in the park."

"True. My situation is even more unreal than yours. At least you move about. I sit here with my crumbling paper. There's a poetic revenge in all this."

"What revenge?"

A hummingbird's breath of a smile brushed across Tommy's lips.

3

The club was not exactly jumping. There were seven patrons, counting Sims and me, and four guys on the bandstand-a goateed sax and his hunchy sidemen.

I didn't know where we were, it might have been Long Beach or Santa Monica or some blurry suburban somewhere. This was the third club we'd stopped at and my scant sense of bearing lay in ruins. Big Sims was not talkative tonight, racing through the landscape with dark determination, half a drink and out the door, like a man assigned a task in an epic poem.

"Hey Sims. Go home, okay? You're not enjoying the music. I don't want you to think."

"The music's okay. It's music."

"But don't think you have to show me the sights. Go home. I'll stay a while and grab a cab."

"Go home."

"Go home. That's right. But first tell me who you're mad at."

"This isn't mad. If you think this is mad," he said.

An elderly fellow brought our drinks, a guy with a wad of cotton in

Eleanor knew how to make him feel lucky. And she was right, she was nearly always right, the tomatoes, the cleaning business, the house with the spacious basement, the daughter who hadn't caused them major aggravation by doing something stealthy out of wedlock. Think of Tommy eating Cambodian takeout in his shop at midnight. Think of Avram in Gorki walking down the hall with the kitchen tap every time he wanted to take a bath.