Grief Street

comfortable in such a position, but it was her long-established reading habit. In her lap was a script that must have been banged out on a very old typewriter with an even older two-tone ribbon. The text was faint black, the headings w ere typed in red.
    Ruby was wearing the thick wire-rimmed spectacles she never takes outside the apartment, preferring contact lenses
    over glasses, which she thinks make her look froggy-eyed. She explains away the vanity for reasons of business: I have to look gorgeous, it’s my job. Specs or no, Ruby is certifiably gorgeous. Her skin is creamed coffee colored; her eyes are hazel, with an olive cast in evening’s light; her ink black hair is what she calls nappy. She has a dimple in her chin. Below that is a décolletage that after I first laid eyes on it caused me a week of thinking little else besides the usual punchline from my childhood storybooks: And then the little boy lived happily ever after.
    Whatever Ruby happens to be wearing—shorts and I sneakers to the gym, a red dress on a Saturday night, one of my blue chambray shirts hanging down to her slim knees on our way to bed—I want to go bite something when I look at her. Even now after we have been together for a number of years, this is true, which does not surprise me because of what happens when I walk into someplace like a restaurant with Ruby: there is the inevitable lonesome guy with a face that seems to be asking, How come a hump like him gets a babe like her?
    “What I think is, it’s a perfect night for the shouters and I the howlers at the moon,” I said, looking up at the bruised sky, trying to be funny and diverting because I did not want to talk about that script of hers. Why, I did not quite know — not yet. “This is some night for the lobotomites.”
    “No, I mean what do you think about Grief Street?”
    “ Snappy title.”
    “That’s all?”
    “What can I tell you? It’s not like I’ve read it for myself. All I know is what you were saying when I left, how it’s I brilliant and political and all. Eddie out there on the corner, he says it’s about the neighborhood.” Suddenly I began realizing what bothered me about this play Ruby loved so much. I asked, “Where does this thing come from?”
    “You know what I wonder?”
    “What?”
    “Where Mr. Mallow heard about it.”
    “That’s it. Eddie’s your bashful playwright.”
    “That I doubt.”
    “Maybe you mentioned it someplace around the neighborhood. It’s the kind of thing Eddie the Ear picks up on. It’s his life.”
    “Whatever.” Ruby waved fingers in front of her face, dismissing unnecessary details. “Anyway, do you think I should do it?”
    Dispensing advice to an actor is tricky. I paced around in front of the window for a couple of seconds, playing for time, calculating an answer. Actors are not logical human beings. But then who is? On top of that, here I was talking to a pregnant actor. Ruby's motherly hormones were giving her the emotional loop-the-loop. How many months before the blessed event? I counted five. So how was Ruby supposed to commit to a rehearsal schedule, not to mention regular performances? But maybe she was talking about staging the piece at her failed theater on South Street, the Downtown Playhouse.
    “How can you?” I reasoned, finally. “I thought you and some real estate agent were supposed to be closing on the theater building next month.”
    “The sale’s definitely on. Then like I told you, we use the money to shop around for someplace nice and big for Mommy and Daddy and Baby makes three—someplace we’re not going to leave until they carry us out sideways. All right?” Ruby sounded like the kind of schoolteacher you want to thwack with a spit wad. “And don’t worry, Hock, like we agreed—it’s going to be someplace in the neighborhood.”
    “I’m not worried.”
    “Then what’s eating you?”
    “Procedure. I mean, don’t playwrights usually mail off their scripts to theaters?”
    “Usually.”
    “You’ve got a theater. For a while anyway. So how come it wasn’t mailed there?”
    “Writers. Go figure.”
    ‘I’ve tried. I’ve been reading them for years.”
    “All I know is, this writer is tuned into my kind of politics. Not to mention there’s a great part for me, the best I’ve ever been offered, to tell you the truth.” Ruby touched the script in her lap. Onionskin pages were held in place with brass pins along the left margins. The padded envelope the