"Where?"
"Here and there." I had one idea, anyway.
She undid her dress and stepped out of it and threw it over her arm. She looked at me for another moment with eyes both jumpy and expressionless. "You wouldn't regret it."
"Some other time, baby. I got to go find that cluck."
"See you," she said and swept out in her bra and petticoat.
This time, when I heard her shower begin, I locked my door. Then I put on a dry, newly pressed seersucker, a light silk tie, and went out before she decided to try again.
The cab tooled along Fifth Avenue a ways, dove through the Park, and rattled into a semislum section—an area of delicatessens and bowling alleys, dated, disreputable hotels, massage parlors, shrieking truck brakes, trickling electric signs, jaded cafeterias, and a crosshatch of streets narrower than the avenues, darker, lined on both sides with identical brownstones that exuded a smell of senescence and rotted brick tenements upon the façades of which hung rusty fire escapes. On the fire escapes were people, their pets, bedding and potted plants, beer pails and radios, along with their accents of Crete, Sicily and the Balkans, Bohemia and Slovakia and Sudetenland—the wonderful poor, the authority for democracy—they said, the intellectuals who had made gods of them without touching them.
I looked, listened, sniffed attentively.
Last chance.