A softly weeping woman on 75th Street, into her cell phone:

"... And I don't know what to do now..."

There's a phone by the pool at my gym, at the Hyatt King's Jewel Hotel on 49th and Broadway, some kind of special phone without a dial that's in a gunmetal box on the wall by the lifeguard. It's suggestive of the communications apparatus in a submarine in World War II - boxy, unfamiliar, fraught with urgent connotations. Why there's a phone I don't know, and why it ever rings I'll never know, but it rings sometimes, and when it rings it makes an eerie sound. Like a kettle all of a sudden on the boil. And it echoes off the steamed-up skylight, and off the walls and water. The lifeguard answers it: a thin Hispanic teenager with long hair, a bandanna and a goatee. When I get out and walk past to the locker room I wonder whether I should say goodnight, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Every time I do he says the same thing: "All right." With a slight accent on the "all." A pronunciation that seeks to reassure, or perhaps under other circumstances to contain, to arrest. "All right."

Sarah S. called me just now, perhaps having inadvertently triggered the auto-dial by sitting on the phone or walking from couch to kitchen with the unlocked keyboard pressed in a confining pocket of too-tight jeans – I say this because I answered and there was no one there. I said Hey, hello, are you there? I heard static and silence intermittently. And then distant, crackling voices. It sounded like an old movie or sitcom. A woman talking to a man about mundane things in that snappy, witty, old-time way. They were discussing having breakfast, lunch or dinner. The woman had a snarky, adenoidal voice I half-recognized. Almost Bette Davis but not really. Lauren Bacall or some shit. Shelley Winters, who knows. Stockard Channing. That honking, tinny American woman’s screen voice, ever calling manhood into question.

Their repartee was punctuated by canned laughs and static, sometimes silence. I imagined how terrified I’d be if, a couple of minutes into this dreamy scene, Sarah’s living voice cut through at me. But it never did. I hung up after awhile.