Invasion of Privacy

enterprising homeless. Interspersed with them were others, like a young mom and her toddler playing Frisbee with a Heinz-57 mutt, the dog able to leap nearly two of its own body lengths into the air from a standing start, the child squealing in delight. Farther along the winding walkway, separate benches held African- J American teenagers necking chastely, a middle-aged Asian-American man in a business suit working on a notebook computer, and an elderly white couple, apparently having an argument, each angled away from the other but speaking alternately in grumbles and hisses.
    Across Charles Street , Parks Department employees lovingly tended the flower beds in the Public Garden , their supervisor the bearded man with the headband who seems to have replaced the tanned man in the hiking shorts. I nodded at the bearded supervisor the way everybody does, meaning thanks for making the effort. He nodded back, a little sadly, I thought, maybe thinking how little more time was left for the blossoms this year.
    Which after last night with Nancy was the wrong way for me to be thinking. I shook it off and continued over the bridge above the Swan Pond. The red and green pontoons for the boats were moored in the center of the pond next to a skiff, the white swan figureheads and bench seating already removed and sent somewhere else till spring. I walked around the equestrian statue of George Washing ton, saber drawn but broken off at the hilt, and then up the’ Commonwealth Avenue mall under the century-old Dutch elms that were also reaching the autumn of their days.
    Jesus.
    I picked up my pace, breaking a little sweat under the second-day shirt. At Fairfield , I turned right, shortly hitting Beacon and going up the steps of the brownstone on the corner. I was renting a one-bedroom unit from a doctor doing a two-year residency in Chicago, and when I opened the apartment door, the morning sun slanting through the violet stained-glass windows across the rear wall of the living room reminded me briefly of a church service.
    I felt tight enough inside that I postponed the shower and change to pull on my running gear and go back downstairs. Crossing Beacon, I went over the pedestrian ramp straddling Storrow Drive and started upstream on the macadam path into a northwest wind that would have spent yesterday blowing newspapers along the streets of Montreal .
    I forced myself to watch the river. Ducks playing tag near the docks, cormorants diving for the fish making a comeback against the receding pollution, a lone night heron looking a little lost in the crotch of a maple tree. College freshmen learned to sail in the tricky, skyscraper-skewed winds, their sunny sails dazzling against the blue-black water. A women’s scull surged downriver in eight-oared spurts, Harvard colors on the crew shirts. A State Police launch drew alongside a Miami Vice motorboat, checking some kind of paperwork.
    After two miles, I tinned back at the Western Avenue bridge, using the pace to force my thoughts toward managing my breathing, a deep breath drawn in for six strides, then blown out with three short bursts to follow. Six-three, six-three, over and over. It bought me fifteen minutes of focused, empty peace.
    Warming down against the trunk of a poplar at the Fairfield ramp, I noticed a golden retriever swimming along ne opposite shore of the lagoon. On the grassy perimeter, two terriers, a cairn and a Scottie, scampered point and drag to the retriever. An older woman waved leashes at the dogs, whistling for them. The terriers responded but the retriever didn’t, just plugging along in the water, jaws open, drinking in the day—and I hoped not too much of the lagoon water.
    Finishing my stretching, I walked back over the ramp, looking forward to a little professional deception to get my mind off my own reality for a while.

    “Let me get this straight,” said the young woman at the copy center, twisting a hank of frosted hair around her index finger. “You want me to type this up like a questionnaire?”
    “Word process it,” I said.
    “All’s we do anymore. We just say ‘type’ because it’s easier, you know?”
    Elbows on the counter, I nodded as a disheartened yuppie asked a male near an enormous Xerox machine to print his resume on “the ivory stock again, same as last time.” My helper read my writing, twisting a different hank of hair. Either she’d been awfully active that way or she’d had a perm recently. “Now, you want