That night, lying by the fire under a set of stars that looked so fresh and clean they could have been minted that morning, in the chilly air that carried on its sleek back the sounds of nightbirds and the splash of fish —maybe this far south a gator tail —I watched the two of them sitting across from me, as Frank, snugged behind her broad shoulders, combed out Hazel’s hair with slow, gentle strokes.

The name on the card was Clark: they were to meet in the ten-minute waiting zone just outside departures. But Clark was late and the morning frigid. McRae got back in his car, drove around, parked in the lot, and walked into baggage claim. 

I was on the back porch washing greens when Harold drove around the side of the house with a stolen canoe on top of the truck and a bushel of oysters in back.

“I thought you were down fishing on the flats,” I said as he came up the steps with the oysters in a sack over his shoulder. 

Aside from the nights she worked, Miss Adele tried not to mess much with the East Side. She’d had the same sunny rent-controlled studio apartment on Tenth Avenue and Twenty-Third since ’93, and loved the way the West Side communicated with the water and the light, loved the fancy galleries and the big anonymous condos, the High Line funded by bankers and celebrities, the sensation of clarity and wealth.

There are four hundred fifty-seven names for heroin. I have learned eighty-two of them. The drug sellers tell me the names, the pushers, the smack heads, the needle-specked little boys pulling their pants down to display their swollen red puds tell me

The place made a lot of fuel, but its most abundant creations were feral cats.

A day after we made our suicide pact, the bank sent a yellow letter saying we’d lose our house. That night, instead of just killing ourselves, Monique and I set the place on fire.

Always they find us inappropriate, but today especially so. Here we are with nowhere to go and nothing to do, sitting in a rusty pickup truck, the one leaking oil, the one with the busted transmission that sounds like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Here we are with the engine running for the AC, the doors wide open for our bare legs to spill out. Because this, right here, to survive the heat, this is all we have.

It was embarrassing that a Gus Van Sant film featured a character whose psychological profile wasn’t that far from Julius’s own.

“Do you know Portofino?” the Frenchman said.