"I've made peace with it," I whispered.
"Excuse me?" said Maura.
"I said I've made peace with it."
"That was quick."
"What do you mean?"
"Wait a minute," said Maura. "What have you made peace with?"
"You tell me."
"Not so fast."
"What do you think I've made peace with?"
"That's what I'm asking you."
"You tell me," I said.
"I think we're going around in a circle."
"Which means what?"
"What do you mean which means what?"
"It could mean there is something you don't want to tell me."
"No, Milo, it's you who won't do the telling. Don't you see? You won't tell me what you've made peace with. So, I can't tell you what I don't want to tell you until I know what it is that you've made peace with."
"I'm no longer at peace."
"Good. You probably shouldn't be."
This is how I knew my wife was having an affair with Paul. The knowledge arrived with a pressured sensation, a pallet of wood on my chest. Deck wood. For a Mission-style deck. I stood, moved to the door.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm going to get some air."
"Daddy, will you get me some?"
"Air?"
"Yeah."
"I'll try, Bern."
"You can't go out now," said Maura.
It was true. We had the evening ritual ahead of us-the dishes, Bernie's books, his teethbrushing, his pre-tuck-in piss, which often required some degree of cajolement, his stories, his songs. It would be a kind of betrayal of the ideals of co-parenting to walk out now. Then again, sliding your tongue along the seam of Paul the Animator's smooth and perfumed scrotum had to hold formidable rank in the hierarchies of betrayal. Maybe someday a civil court judge would sort through the equivalencies. Most of me hoped not.
"I need some air," I said.
A walk around the block convinced me I could not return home tonight.
I headed for the doughnut shop. I wanted doughnut-scented air. My pain had earned me both a Bavarian cream and a coconut chocolate flake. I was the only customer and I sat and ate my doughnuts, pictured myself that lonely diner at the counter in the famous painting. I'd always studied it from the artist's perspective, the stark play of shadow and light. But to be the fucker on the stool was another kind of stark entirely.
Now the door opened and the kiddie-diddler, his herringbone blazer twined shut with twists of electrical tape, wheeled a plaid suitcase into the shop.
"Good evening, Predrag," he said in that radio voice.
The counter kid nodded.
The kiddie-diddler sidled up, tapped a finger on the napkin dispenser. Predrag slid the old man coffee in a paper cup.
"Predrag, my strapping friend, what are the specials tonight?"
"No specials. Doughnuts."
"What about those croissant sandwiches? With the eggs and sausage?"
"What about them?"
"I'm in the mood for one of those delectable concoctions."
"Microwave's broken."
"Yes?"
"They're frozen. You need a microwave."
"Surely you have a conventional oven back there," said the kiddie-diddler.
"These are for the microwave only."
"I'd be surprised if you couldn't defrost them in a conventional oven. You know, Predrag, and I grant that you may be too young to remember this, but there was a time before the microwave. A better time, some would argue, though I wouldn't. That would be silly. No time is better than another time. It's preposterous. There are always people doing kindnesses and there are always people smearing each other into the earth. To think otherwise is foolish. But I dare say it's not so foolish to suppose one could circumvent the problem of the broken microwave and heat the croissant sandwich in the conventional oven, probably to better overall effect. What say you, my Serbian prince? Couldn't be that much of a hardship, could it? Not compared to the Battle of the Blackbirds, I'd wager. What say you, son?"
"I say you don't have any money to buy a croissant, you old queer. Not a dime."
"The Slavs are a brainy lot," said the kiddie-diddler, swiveled toward me on his stool. "Absolutely crazy, as history bears out, but very smart, very courageous, marvelous poets, and also fine logicians."
"The fuck you talking about?" said Predrag.
"Any coarsening effect, as witnessed here, can be blamed on the West, I assure you. What's good in them comes from their Oriental influences, a notion they detest, but understand in their hearts to be the truth."
"Here," said Predrag, threw a frozen croissant in its wrapper at the kiddie-diddler. The old man ripped it open, sucked on the crystals.
"That's right," said Predrag. "Now give me five dollars."
The kiddie-diddler lowered his pastry.
"Young man, you know I never carry that kind of cash around."
"Damn it," said Predrag. "Do I have to call Tommy?"
"No," said the old man, looked at me again. "We won't have to call Thomas, will we?"
"Excuse me?" I said.
"Sir, I recognize you as a man of this neighborhood. A frequenter of this counter. Surely you could find it in your heart to advance the cost of this sandwich. I am good for it."
"Right," said Predrag.
"I am!" said the kiddie-diddler. "Is there no dignity allowed an old man?"
I threw five dollars on the counter. The kiddie-diddler rose, fixed me with his runny blue eyes.
"Sir, so that I may promptly repay you, with interest, may I enquire as to where you reside?"
"In a fabulous and secret universe of the mind."
The diddler blinked, smiled, patted my arm.
"Lifelong resident myself," he said, walked out.
"Jesus," said Predrag. "Every day with that old homo. I hate him."
"Because of the kids?" I said.
"What kids?"
"I don't know."
"Don't be spreading shit like that," said Predrag. "People get their throats cut, you start talking like that. He never hurt anybody. He's a good man. I just hate him. That's all. He gets in the way of my lie. My lie for myself."
"Your lie?"
"That in America, things can be okay."
"Why do you let him back?" I asked.
"It's his store."
"His store?"
"Well, was. Till he went nuts. Now his brother Tommy runs it. Not a very nice guy, Tommy. Lets his brother roam the streets. That's not America."
"Actually, that is America," I said.
"True," said Predrag, "but I don't want to hear it."
He had his tongs up, somewhat martially.
Out in the night again, below the N tracks, I still didn't want to go home. To slink back into the apartment, yank a blanket around my shoulders on the sofa, it seemed a kind of death.
It was too late for Claudia's house in New Jersey. A hotel in Manhattan would be ruinous. To call Purdy stood for another kind of undoing. It would be a mistake to owe him any more than I did. I still hadn't touched the money in the envelope.
Don Charboneau lived the closest, but he and Sasha just had the one room. I couldn't picture us in a group spoon. Maybe it was time to look into that Cypriot let. Still, I needed a place for tonight. Horace bunked with his mother in Armonk. Or had he not mentioned something about some roommates, a new place in Bushwick?
I called him, was at his door in Brooklyn in an hour.
"Milo," said Horace, shirtless, in dirty corduroys. "Welcome to the coop."
He scratched at his chest, led me into his new home.
Horace lived in a huge room filled with cages. Inside each cage was a young person, a futon or cot, a footlocker, a few milk crates. Bare bulbs on wires hung from fixtures in the high ceiling. I'd read about these places. Kids moved to the city, but there were no apartments left to rent to them, or none they could afford. But on a starting salary, or no salary, you could maybe manage a cage. Several dozen people resided here among the drum kits and guitar amps, the antique film editing deck, a few long tables and spindly chairs, a minifridge. Power cables streaked the floor under mounds of black and silver tape. Laptops glowed from the cages. Voices rose and fell, rippled about the room, a dozen conversations going at once, or maybe one conversation replicated over and over by feral and beautiful children.