La Bohème

ON A SATURDAY or Sunday afternoon in the cold early months of 1988, I sat alone at a table for two in a Greenwich Village diner, twenty-four years old, hopelessly young, my notebook open in front of me. At the table next to mine were three people, all white: a woman and her very young daughter, and, across from them, another woman, who talked to the child in a kind way. I recall thinking that this woman was good with kids. When the mother took her little girl to the restroom, the other woman turned to me.

“What are you working on?” she asked.

I’m sure I smiled; that is what I did with everyone, that is what I do.

“Trying to write a short story,” I said.

“I thought so from the way you looked,” she said. “I know that feeling of trying to get something on paper”— and she imitated my expression of paralyzed urgency. We laughed. We talked a little about writing. And at some point, apparently, I told her my first name and where I worked.

Where I worked was a book publishing company in Midtown Manhattan.

Quite a few young people take entry-level jobs at publishing houses because they love books and also, often, secretly or not-so-secretly, want to write them. They sometimes learn the hard way that their passions have very little to do with the day-to-day business of making and publishing books. This is a way of saying that I didn’t love my job.

But I needed to earn a living, meagre though it was, and I was at my desk, ostensibly doing that, when my phone rang two or three days after my visit to the diner.

“This is Liz,” the caller said. She added, clearing up my confusion and handing me a surprise, “We met in the restaurant the other day.” We talked for a few minutes, by the end of which we had agreed that I would come to her apartment in the Village that

Saturday night.

WHERE DO I begin describing the young man who went to Liz’s place? Let’s start with how he looked: darker than some