Union Square. Adrian Koesters

three o’clock and he was leaning slightly out of his bedroom window, looking up and down Stricker Street, spitting down on to the walk, timing how long it took the spit to land, trying to get each lob to land in the exact same place, like horseshoes. He heard a screen open slowly in its frame, looked toward the sound, saw the young girl, Catherine, whom he always called Connie because he could never keep anyone’s name straight, getting home, fumbling with the front door key. Connie, he thought as he always did. She’s going to grow up to be a little something.

      “Nah, she won’t,” he said aloud. “Not if she keeps wearin them saddle shoes like at.”

      He shut up. He could not stand the sound of his own voice.

      The painted china clock on the bedroom mantelpiece chimed out four times. Young got up, bending his head a little under the window sash, stretched, walked over to the clock, turned the key in the round brass hole, and wound exactly four and a half times around. The clock began to tick more brightly. He replaced the clock, stretched again, looked around the room. Think I’ll take me a bath, he thought. Then I’ll read the paper some.

      He lowered his soaped and scrubbed and dried and boxer-short clad haunches into the relative inflexibility of his living room lounge chair. He didn’t know why, or if, it was really called a lounge chair, but it was old, upholstered in a brown velvet material that looked like horse hair and might have been. The carvings on its frame, a painted brown wood of some kind, were round, ornately dug into roses and other images of no particular identity, and he still meant to get the few smears of paint off the upholstery where whoever had done the painting had been careless, but that was a difficulty, because whom after the sun went down could he ask a question about how he would go about doing such a thing? He didn’t know how to do it, how to get the paint off, and when he had asked at the tavern, they’d just looked at him like he was crazy. They had looked at him, though, so he knew he had opened his mouth, but possibly the words he’d thought he had said were not the ones that actually came out. Or perhaps he didn’t speak loud enough for other people to hear. But nobody had said that. Maybe they were just surprised he’d said anything at all.

      Anyways, he said to himself. If he had a telephone he could call the hardware store. The lounge chair was not long enough to lie down in (If I lay down in it I have to bend my knees, he said to himself or out loud as he prepared to get into it, as if that meant something) but the length of it fit the entirety of his legs stretched out, for he had not grown into a tall man like his father.

      This fully stretching out his legs upon a piece of living room furniture was a luxury he reserved as a pleasure in a day filled with long hours and small pleasures, and he straightened his bow tie at the collar, adjusted the fabric of his boxer shorts above his knees, and then began to cry, enjoying the crying in the same way that, each morning he managed to get out of bed while it was still morning, after he had finished his eggs and bacon, he enjoyed a nice long laugh, and each noon he enjoyed the twenty-seven push-ups he did on the earth floor of his cellar, wearing nothing but his undershorts and sleeveless undershirt, listening to the rhythm of the ringer washer cleanse his spare dress shirt and pair of slacks. He had two of each, and whichever was in the laundry he called his spare.

      His feet hurt him. He looked down at his ankles, blue and red with clustered veins and broken capillaries, admiring them. By the end of the evening they would be round and puffy, but now they were nearly sleek, the elegant bones visible and not precisely sharp. Elegant, he thought, elegant and intelligent. Where was that from? A beer slogan? Laundry soap? Ladies’ face powder? Hmm, he thought. Maybe I made it up.

      “I am elegant and intelligent,” he said out loud. By nine o’clock he’d be telling this to Pauline, the name he had given to the tree in his back yard, just before he unzipped his fly and pissed all over her trunk, but now he was pleased with the thought, and believed it, because indeed his ankles were admirable, extending out past the cuffs of his spare pair of slacks. He crossed them, and heard the cat cry from somewhere in the house. I didn’t get no milk out for it yet. I’ma half to do that before long.

      The cat cried again. Quit cryin. It cried again. “You stop that or I’ll give you something to cry for,” he called out, but this iteration merely produced more of the same. Young Emerson took a last wistful look at his ankles, uncrossed and swung them over the edge of the lounge chair, and hoisted himself up. Christ knew he couldn’t sit there and listen to that cat crying for the next two hours.

      Saturday, Two A.M.: Not a Big Eater

      Young Mr. Emerson wanted a glass of milk. But there was no milk. He wanted an egg, and some toast and butter, and some bacon. He knew he had a day-old dry onion roll, and a can of some kind of soup or other and that there was some cat food. He thought he might have a little bit of cheese in the icebox, and he knew there was a block of lard. Maybe there was some tea. He was hungry, but he wanted milk and bread, and there wasn’t any.

      It was some awful hour, he thought. The bread truck would not stop today because he had omitted to put in a new order last night, and he couldn’t get out of bed and make out a new slip and open the door this morning to catch the truck before it came by, although that wouldn’t even happen for another hour or two at least. Yesterday morning he had still had some milk and butter and eggs, but he’d eaten and drunk it all, and then last night as he staggered up the steps and seen the milk bottles there with no slip in the box to indicate what he wanted today, he had sublimely refused to make one out and put it in.

      He’d gotten drunk, drunk-drunk, and over the course of the drunk had decided he was never going to eat again, and this, he would have told you what, felt like the best thing that had ever happened in the entire course of his existence. He was not a big eater anyway. That was true. It was also true that the more he drank, the less he felt like eating, but last night, last night he had arrived at the certitude that eating was somehow wrong, even defective, that no one should eat anymore, and that the state of euphoria in which he found himself would last indefinitely, just as he inevitably thought that the state of drunkenness would last forever when he was in it, and that the wish for food would from this moment forward would no longer trouble him.

      Even on the way home, when he had turned into an alley to vomit, that had felt good and right, too, and had not produced any hunger, but a kind of magical emptiness that appeared to him to be even better than what he’d felt sitting on the bar stool with the last of who knew how many shot glasses of the night in his hand. He had arrived back at his front door and spurned the milk bottle crate at ten p.m., fallen violently into bed and immediately to sleep, and just past midnight had just as violently wakened so hungry and empty that he thought that all he ever wanted to do again in life was eat, and eat.

      But now he couldn’t force himself out of bed to see if that cheese might still be in the icebox, nor to fill out an order from the milkman that would include milk, and bread, and eggs. Why was that again? There was a problem with this, and it had come and gone in his mind a couple of times now.

      Oh, yes, this was it: Because what would be the good of eggs without bacon? He could not fry an egg in lard, nor in butter. He couldn’t bear the taste of it. And he didn’t know how else to make an egg. And then what would the point of the bread be? And he was double-goddamned if he was going to make toast and dip it into a goddamned glass of milk.

      “God god damn it,” he said out loud.

      However, he thought as his stomach growled, Dolan’s would open by eight, and they would have bacon. He could get up and put on his robe and slippers, go down the front stairs very quietly, tiptoe to the kitchen and eat the cheese right now, and then slowly step back to the living room, fill out the slip, silently open the door—no, that wouldn’t work. He had allowed himself to be fooled into purchasing one of those new aluminum screen doors with the mechanism that didn’t slam, and that had seemed like a superlative idea at the time, but he later and to his deep chagrin had realized the air-pump noise of the goddamned thing would alert damn near every waking and sleeping person in likely a three-block radius every time he opened it, and while he was comforted by the thought that if anybody else were to open it, he would hear them—and by the clock, he’d know if it was the mailman opening up the door to put the mail in the slot, or the newspaper boy setting the News American in the vestibule—

      All