Grief Street

white guy whenever one was needed. Did you see me?”
    “Afraid not.”
    “Ruby tells me she’s selling the theater.”
    “That’s right. Money troubles. Lucky for her, the real estate’s worth something.”
    “She tells me she’s back into acting herself. Commercials, legit—anything she can get.”
    “That’s right.”
    “In fact,” Quent said, “I guess I’ll see you two tonight.”
    “You got a call for the reading?”
    “Oh yeah, that crazy play. Just keep pedaling, try pumping up to ninety revs.”
    Quent walked over to the television set that had been blasting out MTV junk since I arrived. He turned up the volume. Possibly there were slack-jawed creatures on Mars who could not quite hear the latest stylings of the latest forgettable band, composed of pimply faces with drug-heavy eyelids screaming in a vaguely southwestern dialect.
    A guy about my own age—a guy after my own heart— comes walking into the gym. He flips on the radio next to the television set and finds WBGO-FM out of Newark. Young Jeanie Bryson, God bless her for being a golden exception to the rule, is singing a Patti Page tune—“Some Cats Know.” Out of respect, the guy flips off the drug addict with the guitar currently sliding over the television screen for the slack-jaws on their StairMasters.
    Somebody shouts, “Hey!” There is a silent chorus of dirty looks. Quent plays arbiter. He douses the radio and returns the tyranny of the lowest common denominator.
    The poor WBGO guy does not want trouble. Lucky for him, he brought his trusty Walkman. I made a note to do the same good thing for myself next time.
    Meanwhile, for the next thirty minutes or so I died numerous times, as much from the music as from the exercise. Quent encouraged me by suggesting that fitness was next to godliness. I told him as a physical trainer he would make a great nun.
    Just as it helped to think of nuns when I felt the urge to reintroduce myself to Mr. Johnnie Walker, it helped to think of them on the rowing machines and the tricep lifters and the over-the-shoulder pulls and all the other cold, black, steely machinery that was supposed to inspire godliness.
    On the other hand, I turned to thoughts of Ruby waiting for the new and improved me to show up at home. I pictured her lying in the middle of a bed covered in white sheets, mocha skin soft and dark and smelling of blueberry, beneath something in ivory satin lace high up the thigh, her fingernails and toenails painted plum red.
    Sheets!
    “Girls, you must never let a boy take you to a restaurant with white tablecloths,” Sister Roberta said. We boys of Holy Cross, suspecting the worst impulses thwarting our advances against our opposite numbers, recruited spies in the girls’ hygiene class. And so we knew precisely what sinister things Sister was saying. “It might put the image of sheets in his head!”
    When the interrupting nuns and the exercises finally did me in, I crawled upstairs to the men’s locker room and sprawled on my back on top of a wooden bench for about twenty minutes. I was breathing like a racehorse, and damping down yet another surface with my sweat.
    I then luxuriated for a quarter hour in a steam room, and topped this off with a shave (unscented) and a cold shower. I had to admit that I felt maybe fifteen pounds lighter, and maybe ten years younger. But I harbored the suspicion it would not be long before stiffness would have its way with me.
    I left the gym and caught the IRT Broadway line uptown to Forty-second Street and stopped in one of the few recent additions to the new family-friendly Times Square I care to patronize: the Stardust Dine-O-Mat, where the waitresses wear khaki uniforms and peaked overseas caps like the Andrews Sisters on canteen duty at the U.S.O.; they look ever ready to burst into a few bars of “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy.” Besides which, the Stardust knows from egg creams and tin roofs and extra-extra-thick chocolate malteds served with long spoons in stainless steel canisters—the latter of which was my revenge for an afternoon’s torture conspired by Ruby, Quent, nuns on the mind, and MTV.

    One booth over from mine sat a Middle American family—Mom and Dad, two boys aged about ten and twelve, a teenage daughter with braces on her teeth—chatting with one another in flat midwestern tones. They were there for the early-bird blue plate special. I enjoyed the thought of those kids somehow finding a way of becoming seduced by the