I wanted two ounces of bourbon, neat, and another two ounces in my coffee, and I couldn't think of a single G.o.dd.a.m.ned reason not to have it. It wouldn't get me drunk. It wouldn't put me back in the hospital. That had been the result of a bout of uncontrolled round-the-clock drinking, and I'd learned my lesson. I couldn't drink that way anymore, not safely, and I didn't intend to. But there was a fairly substantial difference between a nightcap and going out on a toot, wasn't there?

They tell you not to drink for ninety days. You're supposed to go to ninety meetings in ninety days and stay away from the first drink one day at a time, and after ninety days you can decide what you want to do next.

I'd had my last drink Sunday night. I'd been to four meetings since then, and if I went to bed without a drink I'd have five days.

So?

I had one cup of coffee, and on the way back to the hotel I stopped at the Greek deli and picked up a cheese danish and a half pint of milk. I ate the pastry and drank a little of the milk in my room.

I turned out the light, got into bed. Now I had five days. So?

FIVE.

I read the paper while I ate breakfast. The housing cop in Corona was still in critical condition but his doctors now said they expected him to live. They said there might be some paralysis, which in turn might be permanent. It was too early to tell.

In Grand Central Station, someone had mugged a shopping-bag lady and had stolen two of her three bags. And, in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, a father and son with arrest records for p.o.r.nography and what the paper described as links to organized crime bolted from a car and sought sanctuary in the first house they could run to. Their pursuers opened up on them with pistols and a shotgun. The father was wounded, the son was shot dead, and the young wife and mother who'd just recently moved into the house was hanging something in a hall closet when enough of the shotgun blast came through the door to take most of her head off.

They have noon meetings six days a week at the YMCA on Sixty-third Street. The speaker said, 'Just let me tell you how I got here. I woke up one morning and I said to myself, 'Hey, it's a beautiful day and I never felt better in my life. My health's tiptop, my marriage is in great shape, my career's going beautifully, and my state of mind has never been better. I think I'll go join AA.' '

The room rocked with laughter. After his talk they didn't go around the room. You raised your hand and the speaker called on you. One young fellow said shyly that he'd just reached ninety days. He got a lot of applause. I thought about raising my hand and tried to figure out what I might say. All I could think to talk about was the woman in Gravesend, or perhaps Lou Rudenko's mother, slain by a salvaged television set. But what did either of those deaths have to do with me? I was still looking for something to say when time ran out and we all stood up and said the Lord's Prayer. It was just as well. I probably wouldn't have gotten around to raising my hand anyway.

After the meeting I walked for awhile in Central Park. The sun was out for a change and it was the first good day all week. I took a good long walk and watched the kids and the runners and the cyclists and the roller skaters and tried to reconcile all that wholesome innocent energy with the dark face of the city that showed itself every morning in the newspaper.

The two worlds overlap. Some of these riders would be robbed of their bicycles. Some of these strolling lovers would return home to burglarized apartments. Some of these laughing kids would pull holdups, and shoot or stab, and some would be held up or shot or stabbed, and a person could give himself a headache trying to make sense out of it.

On my way out of the park at Columbus Circle a b.u.m with a baseball jacket and one milky eye hustled me for a dime toward a pint of wine. A few yards to the left of us, two colleagues of his shared a bottle of Night Train and watched our transaction with interest. I was going to tell him to p.i.s.s off, then surprised myself by giving him a buck. Maybe I was reluctant to shame him in front of his friends. He started to thank me more effusively than I could stomach, and then I guess he saw something in my face that stopped him cold. He backed off and I crossed the street and headed home.

There was no mail, just a message to call Kim. The clerk's supposed to note the time of the call on the slip but this place isn't the Waldorf. I asked if he remembered the time of the call and he didn't.

I called her and she said, 'Oh, I was hoping you'd call. Why don't you come over and pick up the money I owe you?'

'You heard from Chance?'

'He was here about an hour ago. Everything worked out perfectly. Can you come over?'

I told her to give me an hour. I went upstairs and showered and shaved. I got dressed, then decided I didn't like what I was wearing and changed. I was fussing with the knot of my tie when I realized what I was doing. I was dressing for a date.

I had to laugh at myself.

I put on my hat and coat and got out of there. She lived in Murray Hill, Thirty-eighth between Third and Lex. I walked over to Fifth, took a bus, then walked the rest of the way east. Her building was a prewar apartment house, brickfronted, fourteen stories, with a tile floor and potted palms in the lobby. I gave my name to the doorman and he called upstairs on the intercom and established that I was welcome before pointing me to the elevator. There was something deliberately neutral about his manner, and I decided that he knew Kim's profession and a.s.sumed I was a john and was being very careful not to smirk.

I got off at the twelfth floor and walked to her door. It opened as I approached it. She stood framed in the doorway, all blonde braids and blue eyes and cheekbones, and for a moment I could picture her carved on the prow of a Viking ship. 'Oh, Matt,' she said, and reached to embrace me. She was just about my height and she gave me a good hard hug and I felt the pressure of firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thighs and recognized the sharp tang of her scent. 'Matt,' she said, drawing me inside, closing the door. 'G.o.d, I'm so grateful to Elaine for suggesting I get in touch with you. You know what you are? You're my hero.'

'All I did was talk to the man.'

'Whatever you did, it worked. That's all I care about. Sit down, relax a moment. Can I get you anything to drink?'

'No thanks.'

'Some coffee?'

'Well, if it's no trouble.'

'Sit down. It's instant, if that's all right. I'm too lazy to make real coffee.'

I told her instant was fine. I sat down on the couch and waited while she made the coffee. The room was a comfortable one, attractively if spa.r.s.ely furnished. A recording of solo jazz piano played softly on the stereo. An all-black cat peered cautiously around the corner at me, then disappeared from view.

The coffee table held a few current magazines - People, TV Guide, Cosmopolitan, Natural History. A framed poster on the wall over the stereo advertised the Hopper show held a couple years back at the Whitney. A pair of African masks decorated another wall. A Scandinavian area rug, its abstract pattern a whirl of blue and green, covered the central portion of the limed oak floor.

When she returned with the coffee I admired the room. She said she wished she could keep the apartment. 'But in a way,' she said, 'it's good I can't, you know? I mean, to go on living here, and then there'd be people showing up. You know. Men.'

'Sure.'

'Plus the fact that none of this is me. I mean, the only thing in this room that I picked out is the poster. I went to that show and I wanted to take some of it home with me. The way that man painted loneliness. People together but not together, looking off in different directions. It got to me, it really did.'

'Where will you live?'

'Someplace nice,' she said confidently. She perched on the couch beside me, one long leg folded up beneath her, her coffee cup balanced on the other knee. She was wearing the same wine-colored jeans she'd worn at Armstrong's, along with a lemon yellow sweater. She didn't seem to be wearing anything under the sweater. Her feet were bare, the toenails the same tawny port as her fingernails. She'd been wearing bedroom slippers but kicked them off before sitting down.

I took in the blue of her eyes, the green of her square-cut ring, then found my eyes drawn to the rug. It looked as though someone had taken each of those colors and beaten them with a wire whisk.

She blew on her coffee, sipped it, leaned far forward and set the cup on the coffee table. Her cigarettes were on the table and she lit one. She said, 'I don't know what you said to Chance but you really made an impression on him.'

'I don't see how.'

'He called this morning and said he would be coming over, and when he got here I had the door on the chain lock, and somehow I just knew I didn't have anything to fear from him. You know how sometimes you just know something?'

I knew, all right. The Boston Strangler never had to break a door down. All his victims opened the door and let him in.

She pursed her lips, blew out a column of smoke. 'He was very nice. He said he hadn't realized I was unhappy and that he had no intention of trying to hold me against my will. He seemed hurt that I could have thought that of him. You know something? He had me just about feeling guilty. And he had me feeling I was making a big mistake, that I was throwing something away and I'd be sorry I couldn't ever get it back. He said, 'You know, I never take a girl back,' and I thought, G.o.d, I'm burning my bridges. Can you imagine?'

'I think so.'

'Because he's such a con artist. Like I'm walking away from a great job and forfeiting my stake in the corporate pension plan. I mean, come on! '

'When do you have to be out of the apartment?'

'He said by the end of the month. I'll probably be gone before then. Packing's no big deal. None of the furniture's mine. Just clothes and records, and the Hopper poster, but do you want to know something? I think that can stay right here. I don't think I need the memories.'

I drank some of my coffee. It was weaker than I preferred it. The record ended and was followed by a piano trio. She told me again how I had impressed Chance. 'He wanted to know how I happened to call you,' she said. 'I was vague, I said you were a friend of a friend. He said I didn't need to hire you, that all I'd had to do was talk to him.'

'That's probably true.'

'Maybe. But I don't think so. I think I would have started talking to him, a.s.suming I could work up the nerve, and we'd get into this conversation and gradually I would turn around and the whole subject would be shunted off to the side. And I'd leave it shunted off to the side, you know, because without ever coming out and saying it he'd manage to give me the impression that leaving him wasn't something I was going to be allowed to do. He might not say, 'Look, b.i.t.c.h, you stay where you're at or I'll ruin your face.' He might not say it, but that's what I'd hear.'

'Did you hear it today?'