Before I became lost gazing at the burbling froth in the hot tub I had a drink from the water fountain and I thought: water fountain. There's practically nothing to think about when you think about a water fountain. But then there is. The one on the outside of the Middle School, on that huge, brick, south-facing wall. It was a beacon to those parched from playground exertions. All the way across the blacktop and down a little dirt path across the lawn and all for a sip of salty lukewarm water.

A fountain that frequently contained some kid's spat-out gum. Green, or pink, or white, clean and glistening among the silvery beads. Bearing the useless forensic truth of orthodontic tooth marks.

I emerged from the gym and headed east on 56th Street thinking about music, the oblivious woman at the desk, Delillo's tendency to omit prepositional phrases from the ends of sentences.

Leaving that glaring empty space.

On the train in the café car the man looked like William H. Macy, those little beady eyes below the thick blonde brow in the creased, genial face. The thin lips around a wide, vaguely vulnerable mouth.

"What'll it be?" he asked genially.

I said I didn't know yet sorry. He helped the woman behind me as I continued to gaze upon the different-colored menus with the pictures of chips and nuts and beer.

"Have you decided yet?"

"I, well…"

"Whiskey?"

That was exactly what I wanted. "You… Yes! That was uh, good."

He turned and got it as though it was nothing. Later I returned for more and he seemed to be in a trance, leaning against the inside of the side counter, arms folded. I waited.

"I, sorry, I must have…"

"S'OK!"

I ordered, paid, tipped. As I walked away I heard the transaction behind me: a woman ordered a cup of coffee.

"Nice!" he exclaimed ridiculously.

It occurred to me that perhaps he was some sort of modern mythic figure, heroically guarding his spirits against soul-killing tedium. A whistling Sisyphus.

They seem to like being naked, the men at the gym, bankers and judges and salesmen and all, after a day spent trussed in pants and undershirt, belt and tie. They like standing ungainly with their balls dangling, sheltered from the bemused and judgmental regard of women. It's a sort of unerotic exhibitionism. They like being reduced in each others' eyes.

I heard you coughing clear across the continent.

A construction worker walking ahead of me around the corner of Greenwich and Canal drops his plastic coffee lid to the ground, not tossing it so much as loosing it from the rim and letting gravity perpetrate the misdemeanor. Like he's entitled to not even think about it. And I sort of believed he was.

On the cab ride home.

I had just kissed L. in front of her place in the cold and she'd stopped shivering as soon as we kissed and we kissed at length, elaborately but not extremely, she reticent with the tongue. Yet when I pulled away her lips were dewy, her eyes misty, and she bore an expression I'd never seen before, a faintly melancholy yet expectant look, and I kissed her again, pressing her left shoulder blade with my hand.

On the cab ride home there were men climbing into a hole in the street.

We had that simple life, you and I. We scrounged up change for coffee. With our needs attenuated by our means we were happier than happy.

I slept with K. all last night but didn't fuck her. Wanted to of course, sort of, maybe not. And not that it was necessarily an option. I sensed a stiffness in her frame, something closed. But it was no different than it ever was with her so who really knows. Nothing she did, no gesture, no movement, no words seemed to indicate the slightest desire or  even inclination. Besides the time I caressed her back and stopped and she protested with a pleading murmur. So I continued.

I should have caressed the small of her back and slid my fingers under her waistband and caressed her ass and moved my hand lower as I kissed the nape of her neck and her spine and stroked her thighs where her legs meet her ass. Finally touched her cunt, seen her try to maintain that passive composure.

Which I'm sure she would have. But with a little strain now.

And then this, that, the bleary pauses when someone takes off a shirt or underwear, trying not to slow the sex momentum.

And before you know it.

But I didn't and I don't know why. I was reluctant, afraid she didn't want it perhaps, finally daunted by her melancholic and icy Scandinavian manner.

And then there were the bones in her emaciated torso: her shoulders and rib cage seemed scarily sharp, poking her skin into stark relief like the buttresses of a circus tent.

On the subway platform Saturday or was it Sunday. A disheveled black man with lunatic eyes played the violin for change. He sounded surprisingly good – he played shit like "Ma Vie En Rose" with a delicate touch. A beautiful young woman put a dollar in his case and he immediately stopped playing and handed her the fiddle and bow to play. Strangely, she accepted them without hesitation, as though that were exactly what she'd expected in the transaction. She was French or Italian or something and so he gestured to her how to play. She held the violin stiffly in the crook of her collar and clutched the bow like a knife. The man bobbed his head and pointed for each string he wanted her to play, Like that! Like that! and she drew the bow across the open strings, articulating in succession WANH WANH WANH WANH, four hideous rasping notes; a jagged, tuneless melody from someplace in hell. He nodded and smiled vigorously and she smiled and handed him back his instrument then slipped sprite-like into the dour crowd.

I gave him all my change on the way onto the train: quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies.

The cabbie again. Went the wrong way. I didn't even notice until the neighborhood got shitty on 3rd Avenue. 101 Street, 102 Street.

"You have to go across and stop on 105th and Fifth."

He didn't seem to understand.

"I go left, I come back up."

"No, you have to take a right." I felt my voice tighten into the speech of an unapologetic and resolute prick. There was a mean pleasure there. "You have to go right on Madison. No I mean right on Park. Right up to 106th. Then 105th and Fifth."

There were some unfamiliar garbage cans in the street before my building.

The suicide note said, "I love you! Bye!"

On the fuselage at the edge of the doorway a faint trace of a word had been left, in paint that perhaps had permeated some tape or a sticker since removed. The word was repeated five or six times in a column: VOID.

    VOID

    VOID

    VOID

    VOID

    VOID

It was the muffled, lustful plea of all the plane's pressurized contents, static yet animated with the potential to explode into cold, dark space.

Coffee maker 1.

I tried to go to the Y the other day and was put off by the entire experience, spoiled as I was by the other gym I'm trying, the New York Health & Racquet Club, with its petty amenities and sickly sweet odor of eucalyptus and complimentary body wash, the beautiful front desk girl, the carpeted locker room, the mustachioed attendant dressed in blinding, immaculate white.

It was the kind of morning where the alarm goes off when you least expect it.

There is no correct way to live.

In the cab on the way home I got the dizzying sense that I was headed downtown not uptown. There was a slight downward pitch perhaps and that got me thinking. The street numbers blew by with all their incontrovertible authority: 14th, 23rd, 42nd, 59th. Yet all along I felt I was heading downtown and I liked it that way. Heading down, down, down.

The wind is howling I can feel it in my bones.

There was a missed call on my cell phone the other day and I didn't recognize the number. In fact two calls. I figured I'll call  them back. And it was B's number, a number that once had been so familiar, a number that I'd nearly memorized but had since put out of my mind. I left her a message:

"Hi, it's Pat. You called me, so hey. Call me back."

My tone was measured, unsurprised. Cool but not unfriendly in the least. I wanted her to call back. Because. Because. I miss fucking her.

She never called back and I came to interpret her gesture as an appeal for me to stalk. I knew all along she craved that kind of attention from men, from the time she showed me the portrait in her study that had been painted by a jilted lover. It was a garish, life-size depiction of her with butterfly wings and a sort of Sherwood Forest tunic. Herself mythologized. And there were the pleading, desperate e-mails she forwarded to me from that idiot she went to New Orleans with but never fucked, saying look how funny, but really saying look how men debase themselves for me.

She collected stalkers and admitted as much, laughing, but of course she didn't think she did on purpose and maybe she was partly right. I never heard her so serious as when I asked her where she lived, when we were to meet up for one of our earliest dates. There was a pause on the phone.

"OK. I'll tell you. But I want you to absolutely promise me one thing. This is serious."

"Sure. What?"

"Promise me you'll never, ever, ever, ever show up at my place unannounced."

I promised. But again, I wonder if extracting this vow from men – for this was surely not the first time – was her signal to them to do just the opposite. If it was in fact the devious fusing of some emotional bomb and not a prudent plea for reason.

She wants me to call again. I can feel it.

Shaq is injured.

Joe

Joe had only ever met his new neighbors at the bus stop but they seemed nice enough. A rosy-faced blonde girl who looked to be right out of college, first job in the city. An older woman, mid-30s maybe, who wore rectangular glasses with green frames and a leopard-print fur hat.

Then there was the guy. His hair was fair and shaved real close, a number two maybe, and he was always a little underdressed for the winter, and he never really looked you in the eye, and he had the trace of a smile on his lips always, and he seemed sort of blank, like a being you could fill up with anything you wanted.

Often at night Joe heard moans of deep sexual excitement through the wall. There was the guy's voice, panting, going Uh! and there was a woman's voice, he didn't know which one, or maybe sometimes it was one and sometimes the other but he couldn't tell them apart. Maybe both at once.

The woman's voice, and the things she said, the sounds she made, Jesus Christ thought Joe. Right through the wall. He'd sit up on his pillow smoking and listening. She'd develop a groan from deep inside. It would start like a kind of industrial whine, unhuman, not even animal, and then grow louder and pass through entire taxonomies of cat, of bird, of unnamed beast before she'd climax and burst into thirsty gasping breaths of extravagantly human delirium. Saying YEAH UHHH YEAH YEAH UNGHHHH! UNGGG!

Joe was fascinated but it didn't turn him on. In fact at times he was plain spooked. The woman would sometimes suddenly break into articulation, interrupting a long droning moan with OH GOD OH GOD OH NO OH NO OH GOD NO as though she'd dropped a baby out a high-rise window. There was sometimes a terrible strain in her voice like she was lifting an enormous weight. And a hint of rage in her wailing frustration. Joe came to imagine her as a Sisyphus who succeeds. He could not think of sleeping before he heard her come. In fact he could do absolutely nothing but smoke in the dark.

New Year's Eve at John's was even-keeled and uneventful – no good drugs, no one had sex with a stranger, no one became spectacularly sick over the fire escape let's say, or even into a potted plant. The most raucous moment was when Sean knocked over a bottle of red wine. The clap it made on the floor cut through music and conversation, people gave a generous berth to the red splatter and gazed upon it with worried wonder.

The other night Aimee and Jeff and I went to a swanky French restaurant on 20th Street and, flush and giddy with the uniqueness of the occasion, ordered the six-course tasting menu and its accompanying wines. It was great – for some reason much better than my recent experiences at other fancy restaurants where you get some exquisite appetizer but by the time the main dish comes you've lost interest somehow, not full so much as mentally depleted by the arduous tasting you've already done. They bring out those lukewarm medallions of meat with the squiggles of dipping sauce and the dollops of pureed vegetables and you think Jesus Christ, I have to eat this now? Wine always helps.

But here each dish was smallish and unique and though the main course was the weakest the entire experience left me energized.

And as I try to remember what was memorable I think of Al Pacino playing the real estate salesman in "Glen Garry, Glen Ross" seducing his mark in the Chinese place, saying "What does a life consist of? What do you remember in life? A good meal?" Spitting the words, getting ready to open that glossy green pamphlet of worthless tracts and go in for the kill. And so I try to actually remember a good meal after all, every now and then. And what I remember about this one is the solitary scallop in a bowl of buttery, frothy cream sauce in which swam several thick blades of some wonderful waxy-chewy thing. I have no idea it was but its texture as well as its delicate taste was familiar in some deeply comforting way. It felt good between the teeth, a vividly sensuous experience.