Manhattan Is My Beat

joke.”
    He glowered and handed her a pink While-You-Were-Out slip. “Another thing, this isn’t message central. Now, go get coffee and make it up to me.”
    “You bet,” she said cheerfully. He eyed her uncertainly.
    The message was from Richard. It said, “Confirming our ‘date.’ “ She liked the quotation marks. She folded the pink slip of paper and slipped it into her shirt pocket.
    “Here,” Tony grumbled. Handing her money for the coffee.
    “Naw, that’s okay,” she said. “It’s on me.”
    Perplexing the poor man no end.

     
    “You’re from Ohio?”
    It was eight P.M. They were sitting in Rune’s gazebo, listening to the Pachelbel Canon. Rune had eight different recordings of the piece. She’d liked it for years—even before it had caught on, the way
Greensleeves
and
Simple Gifts
had.
    Richard continued. “I’ve never met anyone from Ohio.”
    She was wearing a black T-shirt, black stretch pants, and red-and-white-striped socks. She’d done this as a homage to Richard’s costume the other night. He, however, was in baggy gray slacks, Keds, and a beige Texaco Service shirt with the name Ralph embroidered on the pocket.
    This man is
pure
Downtown. I love him!
    Rune sang, “ ‘What’s round on the ends and high in the middle? It’s O-Hi-O!’ That’s it. One more syllable and Rodgers and Hammerstein could’ve written a musical about it.”
    “Ohio,” Richard said thoughtfully. “There must be something in that. Solid, dependable. Working-class. Sort of metaphoric. You were there and now you’re”—he waved his hand around the loft—”here.”
    “It’s a nice state,” she said defensively.
    “I don’t mean anything bad. But why’d you come here and not Chicago or L.A.? A job?”
    “No.”
    “I know. Boyfriend.”
    “Nope.”
    “You moved to Manhattan by yourself?”
    “To go on a real quest, you
have
to go by yourself. Remember
Lord of the Rings
?”
    “Sort of. Refresh my memory.”
    Sort of? How could he not remember the best book of all time?
    “All the hobbits and everybody started out together, but in the end it was Frodo who got to the fiery pit to destroy the ring of power. All by his little-old lonesome.”
    “Okay,” he said, nodding. Not sure what the connection was. “But why Manhattan?”
    Rune explained. “I didn’t spend a lot of time at home in the afternoons. After school, I mean. My dad was pretty sick and my mom’d send my sister and me out to play a lot. She got the dates and boyfriends. I got the books.”
    “Books?”
    “I’d hang out at the Shaker Heights Library. There was this book of pictures of Manhattan. I read it once and just
knew
I had to come here.” Then she asked, “Well, how ‘bout
you?
“
    “Because of what Rimbaud says about the city.”
    “Uhm.” Wait. She’d
seen
the movie and hated it. She didn’t know
Rambo’d
been a book. She thought of the cardboard cutout in Washington Square Video—of Stallone with his muscles and that stupid headband. “Not sure.”
    “Remember his poem about Paris?”
    Poem
? “Not exactly.”
    “Rimband wrote that the city was death without tears, our diligent daughter and servant, a desperate love, and a petty crime howling in the mud of the street.”
    Rune was silent. Trying hard to figure Richard out. Downtown weird
and
smart. She’d never met anyone like him. She was watching his eyes, the way his long fingers went through a precise ritual of pulling a beer can out of the plastic loops that held the six-pack, tapping the disk of the top to settle the foam, then slowly popping it open. Watching his lean legs, long feet, the texture of his eyes. She had a feeling that the posturing was just a facade. But what was underneath it?
    And why was
she
so drawn to him? Because there was something she couldn’t quite figure out about him?
    Because of the mystery?
    Richard said, “You’re avoiding my question. Why did you come here?”
    “This is the Magic Kingdom.”
    “You’re not addressing Rimbaud’s metaphor.”
    Addressing?
Why did he have to talk that way?
    Rune asked, “You ever read the Oz books?”
    “‘Follow the yellow brick road,’ “ he sang in a squeaky voice.
    “That’s the movie. But Frank Baum—he was the author—he wrote a whole series of them. In his magic kingdom of Oz, there were lots of lands. All of them are different. Some people are made out of china, some have heads like pumpkins. They ride around on sawhorses. That’s just what New