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TWENTY

W hen the song ends, Eddie reaches for the camera on the table. He raises it, aims it at the piano player, and presses the button. The flash fires again, this time reflecting from the piano man’s spectacles and back into Eddie’s eye, blacking out his vision. Shocked by the sudden burst of light, he draws a hand over his eyes.

And then: Crash!

Someone just dropped a tray of drinks behind the bar, piercing the room with a brittle eruption of sound, rupturing the moment.

Eddie opens his eyes to see that the bar is back to where it was when he got here. He’s in his own clothes now, his own jeans and sneakers. The woman at the next table is checking something on her laptop. A pair of men at the bar are arguing about whether to get tickets to Merrily We Roll Along or Kimberly Akimbo . The bartender is calling over a waitress to help him reboot the electronic payment system. It’s the twenty-first century again and Eddie’s little hallucination is over. Just a boy in a hotel bar with an un-sipped Coke on his table, his Polaroid, and Cookie’s copy of Enough Rope .

Dazed, he leaves ten dollars on his table and gets up to go. On the way out, he notices the clock over the bar again. It says 2:31. Only a minute has passed. Strange. It feels like he’s been here for longer than that. Even the song itself lasted several minutes. He wonders for a moment whether this place is enchanted, but decides that the missing time is just more evidence that it was all a vivid vision.

On the subway downtown, back in the real world, Eddie remembers what the woman in his vision said: Heterosexuality is not normal. It’s just common. It’s a pretty good line, if he does say so himself. Because he made it up, of course. He made all of it up—every flash of light, every clink of glass, every swirl of cigarette smoke. Even the electrifying touch from the waiter. The only part he didn’t create was the Cole Porter song. That he imported from band class. That’s what he tells himself. That’s what he’ll believe.

He steps off the train at the West Fourteenth Street station by accident, a stop too early. But he doesn’t worry. He can walk from here. He has time.

As he walks, he constructs another fantasy, to prove he still can. He pictures himself with a group of young men in 1920s waistcoats leaning on a Ford Model A at a corner newsstand. He blinks and makes a new one: a trio of uniformed Navy officers waving pamphlets at passersby, recruiting young men to join up to fight in World War II. And another: a group of 1950s beatniks in stovepipe chinos, smoking outside a coffee shop, swapping tattered paperback poetry books. The visions are clear, vivid, thick with detail. Are the specifics accurate? It doesn’t matter. They’re his own, and he can change them as he likes, turn them off and on, banish them at will. He breathes deeply and smiles at the sidewalk, balanced again.

He winds through the Village toward Bedford Street with the camera strap over his shoulder and the paper bag with the opera cakes hanging from his fingers. He feels gravity under his sneakers and wonders about the centuries of people who’ve walked over these same cobblestones. He glances up at the windows of the old apartment buildings and wonders about the generations of tenants who’ve leaned out of them. He wonders how old the cracks in the sidewalks are, how they came to be. He wonders how Manhattan can hold so many stories. What a sturdy little island. What a rock.