Grief Street

dryer.”
    “Look, I promise—we’ll have a heart-to-heart someday soon. Right now I’m dog tired. Before I go home, though, I have to know something.” I reached for my wallet. “You want money? I’m taking it out of my own pocket.”
    “It ain’t the dough. Jesus, Hock—you think it was about the dough?”
    In a heat of embarrassment I did not completely understand, I put away my wallet and left Eddie’s question unanswered. I looked at him carefully. For the first time in my life I tried to picture him someplace besides in a chair leaned up against the outside wall of a cop bar. I drew a blank. Which was pathetic for a cop once praised for having a near lunatic imagination. I tried to cover up my further embarrassment by putting a sideways question to Eddie, which he answered in a sideways fashion of his own.
    “By the way, Eddie—what did you think of the play?”
    “What makes you think I read it?”
    “Interest in the Kitchen, in the people who live here. Besides which you told me yourself what it was generally about.”
    “Yeah, I got interest in people. All kinds. Ain’t it ironical some people don’t got any interest in me?”
    “What about the playwright? Do you find him interesting, too?”
    “Only interest I got in a writer is if he’s any good.”
    “What’s good by your lights?”
    “A writer worth reading makes a riddle out of an answer.”

    I have learned to know when something is seriously troubling Ruby. She stays home for the day and conducts a certain domestic ritual.
    First, she hauls out a packing box from under the bed.
    This is a clumsy square thing that could just as well be stored in some dusty corner of her theater, but which instead she insists on having close by. She brings this box out to the kitchen, opens it up, and pulls out an electric contraption: an Oster bread-making machine, which takes over the single, foot-square kitchen counter.
    By the way, ours is a kitchen in name only. The bare minimum of appliances are crammed Pullman-style against an alcove wall: two-burner range, tiny sink, half-size refrigerator, two overhead cupboards. There are no drawers. Dishes and cutlery and so forth are kept a few steps away in the parlor sideboard.
    So this is what confronted me on returning home from a day that for me had begun with a rousting and ended in a serpentine conversation with Eddie the Ear: Ruby standing at the kitchen alcove, flour spots on her cheeks, tapping her foot; bread machine steaming and gurgling; wooden cutting board balanced on the stove top, covered in flour; half the sofa taken over by finished loaves cooling down, each one neatly covered with a checkered dish towel. All this bread is too much for us, of course, and so Ruby mostly gives it away; I myself have delivered loaves to Holy Cross and the soup kitchen, too.
    1 kissed Ruby hello and sank into my easy chair, a big fringed green upholstered number, circa 1935, that came to me via Salvation Army. It is always after such a disquieting day as today when I sit in that chair wishing I had a dog.
    "Maybe after the theater is sold, and when we move to someplace bigger, I can go up to the pound in East Harlem and find myself a nice mutt,” I said to Ruby’s back. She opened the Oster and popped out a fresh brown loaf with a nutty aroma.
    “Another mutt. That’s all we need around here.”
    “You have a bread machine, I should have a dog.”
    “Why?”
    “So I can come home and make a fool of myself on the floor with a dog. The dog won’t scold me. Not only that, he’ll make a fool of himself, too.”
    “Don’t you think you’re doing just fine alone?”
    “I love you, too.”
    “Incidentally, are you saying I’m making a fool of myself baking all this bread?”
    “You’re nobody’s fool, Ruby.”
    She turned. Somewhere in the short space of time between my walking through the door and plopping myself down in the green chair Ruby had begun to cry. We are both learning about pregnancy and hormones and rollercoaster mood swings.
    “I’m your fool, Irish.”
    She swept over to me and sat in my lap, eyes streaming tears. I wondered what on earth I should say.
    “The story in the paper,” Ruby said, before I had the chance of anything myself. Her shoulders heaved. “I'm so sorry.”
    “Sorry for what?”
    “If I wasn’t in theater...” Ruby paused. Her shoulders trembled. I pulled her closer. “After I read the Post this morning, I couldn’t help thinking I’m... well,