They found a taxi idling in front of an old flophouse.

But in truth, let's be honest, it was Marvin who shuffled, Marvin who was the true schlimazel, bad-lucked in his own mind, Marvin the Dodger fan, doomed in ways he did not wish to name.

A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen-she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.

Time to think about going to bed. But first he took her dancing in the penthouse lounge of their hotel, an intimate room with a combo, well past midnight.

They moved across the floor, swayed and dipped-not really dipped but only showed a pause, a formal statement that such a thing as a dip could happen here. They liked to dance, were good together, used to go dancing but forgot, let the habit slip away through the years the way you forget a certain food you used to devour, like charlotte russes when they were popular.

She ran her hand through his fire-resistant hair.

And Marvin held her close and felt the old disbelief of how they'd found a life together, such fundamentally different people even if they weren't, and he knew the force of this disbelief was the exact same thing, if you could measure it, as being stunned by love.

But in the deep currents, in the Marvinness of his unnamed depths, there was still an obscure something that caused disquiet.

And when they danced past the window he looked out at the lights of the Bay Bridge spotting through the mist and saw the old forlorn tanker snug in its berth, pungent and shunned, and he counted over to pier 7 and found that the Lucky Argus was already off-loaded and gone, borne on the tide, a dark shape going at what, flank speed, in the great deep danger of night.

"He's wearing a white suit and those shoes I can never remember what they're called."

Out of nowhere I thought about how our faces changed, how I tried to spy out a sign in another man's eye that would tell me how worried I ought to be but at the same time how I avoided eye contact until I'd had a chance to gain a certain purchase on the situation and how we seemed to agree together, as the room whistled and groaned, that if we all carried the same face we would be free from any harm.

"Can I call a cab from here? Go home. Make up with her. Don't subject the episode to ten hours of neurotic scrutiny."

"Go home."

"Go home. What are those shoes called that I'm trying to think of? Tell her you're sorry. Don't let it fester. Old-fashioned two-tone shoes."

He looked at me, measuring.

"We'll go to a ball game sometime. You're coming back in a few months, right? We'll go to a game."

"I don't want to go to a game."

"We'll go to a game," he said.

We drank up and left. In less than fifteen minutes we were in another club listening to hornplayers rake the walls, four guys in fezzes and caftans with a physical sound and a drummer who's making mostly vocal noise, off-pitch wails and cries.

We ordered drinks and listened a while and then Sims leaned in closer.

"Happen to me twice since I been out here. Pull their guns. My life held in some cop's bent finger because I resemble a suspect or my tail-light's out. And he's out of the car. And he gets me out of the car. He says, I need you to get out of the car right now. And I get out of the car. And he says, I need you to hit the roof and spread them wide. But I just look at him. And he looks at me. We look at each other with a longing to kill that's completely puzzling in one sense and completely natural in another."

I nod and wait. He sits very serious over his drink, Sims.

"You want to be my friend, you have to listen to this," he said.

The walls were decorated with old Pacific Jazz album covers and we one nostril. He had a T-shirt that read Monday Night Football at Roy Earley's Loins and Ribs. It wasn't Monday and we weren't there.

I said, "What happened?"

"What happened. What happens at home?"

"You had a fight with Greta."

"Forget it," he said. "Drink up."

"These guys ain't half bad."

"It's music. Drink up," he said.

"lour stomach's knotted up."

"The fact is we never fight."

"You never fight. Marian and I never fight. So when it happens."

"Ibu retain it in the body."

"You feel a knot, a weight."

"We never frigging fight."

"We never fight, Marian and I. Go home and make up. I'll call a cab. Can I call a cab from here?"

"You're going a little gray," he said.

"You're going a little bald."

"I'm going a lot bald. But you're going a little gray."

The tenor was hitting cubist notes and we'd had a number of half drinks and the drummer was firing rim shots or whatever they do and in the local noise and the wider dislocation of a nightscape that was unfamiliar, I tried to understand what Sims was saying.

"Seriously, go home. I'm fine. I like these guys. It's hard-driving stuff."

"It's race music," he said.

"It's hard-driving free-wheeling jazz."

"It's race music. You like it for what you want to like it for. I'll like it for what I want to like it for. I'll show you this picture I've got at home. Great photograph, circa I don't know, nineteen-fifties. Charlie Parker in a white suit in some club somewhere. Great, great, great picture."

"A club in New York."

He gave me a flat-eyed look.

"You know this?"

"Great picture," I said,

"Wait. You know this? A club in New York?"

shoes by the way. Those aren't the shoes I mean when I talk about two-tone shoes."

"It sounded like the death and burial of music."

"Jerk. You should have kept it."

"Wait. I'm a jerk?"

"Great thing to have. You keep things like that. A secondhand horn? Great thing."

"Wait."

"Big mistake, Sims."

"I'm a jerk?"

The pianist came out first, then the bass. The drummer wore a headband and dark glasses.

"The ship's back," he said. "You know that?"

"No."

"Up the coast in San Francisco."

"Who tells you these things?"

"You know how rumors work. Nobody tells you. You just hear."

"What do you hear about the cargo?"

"That's a whole other deal," Sims said, slipping into the forced-air voice of a used-car salesman, and a cracker at that, and a laugh shot out of me. "That's real innerestin. That's the sweetest deal about this whole buncha rumors."

The horn finally showed, a rangy man with a gold chain and a gap in his front teeth, wearing resort clothes and sandals.

"They said it was heroin. They said it was the CIA moving heroin to finance some covert operation. But we didn't believe this, you and I."

"Because we're responsible men."

"And we were right," Sims said. "Because it's not heroin. It's not toxic chemicals, it's not industrial ash and it's not heroin."

"What is it?"

"It's a mixup over a word. That's what it is."

"Which word?"

"You know what heroin's called. It's called scag, it's called horse, it's called H, it's called smack, it's called this, it's called that. And what else, Nick?"

"Called shit."

turned our heads toward the bandstand and felt the force of the music, a sophisticated jazz that had the texture of life-and-death argument.

I told him, "Yes." I said, "Yes, I'm going a little gray. But I don't understand why this is worse than all-out bald. Which is your own admitted destiny."

"That's the point."

"What point? A little gray is not the most ominous thing that happens to a man."

"Let's get rolling, okay?"

"Why?"

"There's a place."

"I'm enjoying this place."

"I'm showing you some things, okay? You have to accept this," he said. "I'm here, you're not."

"All right. But you ought to go home. Tell her you're sorry."