One day we were sitting around the three-legged table in the Harriman Arena. I said, "I sometimes wish for whiskers," and Hooby said, without missing a beat, "Yeah, I sometimes think I'd dig a tail." Valerie said, "You are one of the most entertaining people I know." And Hooby and I thought, in concert, that this brand, too, shall find a market.

Once she answered the phone, "Hello, this is Hooby." I said, "Hooby, is that you?" She said, "If there is any other Hooby in your life, I'll kill you." She called me the Lady of Shalot, Nixon, and a changeling, depending on the scene. In eateries she always got the extra cream or sauce for which she asked. She said of the Dean, once, that he had to underestimate people, else a fair number of them would end up very disappointed. When the editorial board of The Columbia Review suggested we have beer, she said, "Some people come to Meeting already overserved." She did not knock on doors, but rather stood outside them and sang. If she could not finish her paper because her thoughts were under arrest, I told her to close the lights and imagine she was on Oprah. If Oprah asked a question, it could not go unanswered, because the whole world was watching.

When we went to Koronets for pizza, we paid in nickels and dimes. Once we were a quarter short, so she reached into her pocket, pulled out a Lindt chocolate, and laid it gently on the counter. "What is this, and a partridge in a pear tree?" she said, her voice bubbly with mirth. We were regulars. We always got away with as much as we could carry in our bellies.

Famous last words

"Tell them that Frank will be there shortly to make a citizen's arrest," he said, referring to himself in the third person. "Get Frank some product," he said, meaning free Coca-Cola from a function on the 15th floor. He was quick to blame "the ladies who lunch" if anything was amiss in the kitchenette. "Here comes Barbara," he said wearily, as the woman shuffled across the Harriman Arena towards his office. "You look like a refugee," he told the librarian, who carried her bag everywhere for fear of theft. "What in God's name do you want?" he asked. When they had gone, he opened a drawer and confided, "This, this is a gaggle of colored file folders which I've been able to hide from the women in this office."

"See this? Memorize it," he told me whenever he got a long email from HR explaining a new policy. When he was particularly harried, he sang, "Into each life a little rain must fall, but too much has fallen into mine." He lived so far out on the Island that he called it Nova Scotia. His house was Lilliputian. In return, he lived expansively in the office. He kept three desks. People from other institutes donated their used binders to him. He was frugal, but splurged once on a box of colorful paperclips for his own use. He used black ones when he felt vengeful about an invoice, and chipper red ones when he was looking forward to golf. Once he found a handful of plain metal clips. "These are plebeian," he said. "Send them out to join the masses." And I brought them out into the Arena, which he had baptized. He dined each afternoon at the head of the long conference table in 1219, which he called "The Hotel." As the hour approached 2 o'clock, he said, "I must dine before I collapse. When I call you from my lunchroom, bring paper and pencil." He interrupted his sandwich: "Your mission, Ms. Phelps, should you choose to accept it," he said, and reeled off some figures for me to add. He knew the collection times for all the local mailboxes, and sometimes sent me home a few minutes early, to make sure his letter made the cut.

All summer he waited for the famous June 31 report. When a long-awaited check came, he announced, "The Eagle has landed." He typed letter by letter, with the eraser of his pencil. He never signed anything with an inferior pen. "Too many clicks," he said wearily, navigating some website. If he wanted me to minimize a window, he said, "Put a minus sign on that one." Excel was Expedia. He called his programs, "icons." Every time he sneezed, he said that sneezing was a colossal waste of time. At the end of each day, he bid me to centralize, that is, neatly stack all the paper he'd spread out in the course of the day. Heading out the door, he said, "Do the right thing by my machine," and struck out for Nova Scotia through uncharted territory.

My tongue is out of office [1]

We went yesterday to Baxter's Pub across the street from the prison, for a Bureau drink. Again I drank a Coke in your honour, but the toast festered undelivered in my grubby fist, because the spirit did not move the assembled company. The establishment was empty but for us and the bartender, who craned his head to see the television suspended above him. He was incapable of smile and scowl alike. A lone cop kept checking his reflection in his shone shoes. I kept my feet in a nest beneath me. I was wearing my harlequin socks and waiting for someone to split the table. I decided that Baxter had lived under the jurisdiction of an eclipse. I ate the ice off the bottom of the Coke. I considered the stampede in my fist.

Peel open my fist, I said, and I'll waylay you with a story. It will be unhurried like a jar of molasses in a fair tide. We'll dwell on something invisible to the newsman's eye. We'll hold at bay anything a newsman might fancy. If we slow down enough, we'll deceive the party whom we pursue, and that party will finally get some shut-eye.

[1] The Revenger's Tragedy

Frank and Nixon

I told Frank that you used to call me Nixon, and that I was never quite sure why. "Maybe, kk," he said, "maybe you lied."

Once Frank suggested I take the spare key to Harriman and study in the Arena on the weekends. "I'd better not," I said. "They don't call me Nixon for nothing."

In the morning, on her way to the Q, she saw a "No Standing Anytime" sign that had been wrenched out of the sidewalk and knocked to the ground. For in fact, no standing is allowed on that street, and that goes for the signpost itself, too. No exceptions.

In class, she always felt like an undercover, like a man who knows that as soon as he leaves, he won't do this anymore.

Elena Mikhailovna owned two refrigerators. Both stood in the kitchen. As far as I could tell, she kept food only in the first one. I had been living there for about a month when she suddenly transferred everything to the second one. Of course, the transfer occured while I was out.

There was also a washing machine in the kitchen. Before I could ask to use it, Elena M. told me it was broken. Her son, Kirill, washed his clothes by hand in a basin, and hung them to dry on a line stretched between the two refrigerators. He did not wring the clothes out very well, and they would drip onto the kitchen floor. Elena M. liked to stand back with her hands on her hips and shake her head at the dripping clothes. I took the hint and wrung my clothes as best as I could. My jeans were a disaster the first time I tried to wash them, and so that was the last time I washed them. Kirill often left his clothes to soak in the basin for days on end. I lived in perpetual wait for the basin to be free and the clothesline, unpopulated.

I noticed that if I went away for the weekend, I would return to find that all the sheets and towels had been washed and that the washing machine was still rumbling lightly with the satisfaction of having been used.

At Elena M.'s, I had my own plate, bowl, and teacup, as well as fork, knife, and spoon. This ensemble was kept apart from the rest of the dishes. I sweetened my tea with jam from a little dish that also belonged especially to me. Elena M. would stand over me while I ate breakfast and dinner. She and Kirill would eat later, separately.

One rainy day I was killing time in the city. I bought a kilogram of fried doughnuts for 100 rubles, because that sounded like a good deal (which it was). However, I did not imagine how enormous a kilogram is. I ate half the doughnuts. I considered bringing the rest to Elena M.'s table for dessert. In the end, I kept them in my room like contraband, and took them to the university the following day for lunch.

Shortly thereafter, I ran away from Elena M.

This story is true.

I remarked that leaving my keys at the Duane Reade was twice as silly as when you did it, because I should have learned from your mistake, and you said, No, it's four times as silly, because you're half my size.

Case closed!, said the busdriver as we dropped in our fares.

Let your elegant style meet our precise stitch!, sang the billboard across the street from the bus stop.

I hope I don't get into a fight on the bus, said the driver. I hope I got all happy folks!

You kept an eye on the road through your binoculars. You said, I'm like Christopher Columbus when it comes to certain things.

University

We spent three years together in a university that tattooed little blue crowns on stationery and napkins alike, and for three years we carried exhaustion in our pockets like stones. We wanted to set those stones into our jewelry so as not to waste them. We could not discern, of what the exhaustion was born. We knew that when we slept, we slept like the dead.

We had a sometime habit of taking our daily constitutional amidst the desperate shrubbery. The squirrels ran wild, sometimes knocking into our feet. You had small ears and I was blind as a mole, so between the two of us we were a veritable visionary. We were beggars and choosers: we lived on what we could lift from the various catered functions staged on the campus. It was a miserable campus: there was always someone to avoid. We had to keep moving. We would not let anyone corner us. We had a complicated system of warning signals and a secret language.

We lived in a building called River. You called me mermaid and wrote me an ode. Your room was a magic chamber. You smashed the lock so you wouldn't have to worry about keys. You never used the overheard lights, but rather a series of lamps, whose bases and shades you had painted. Your table, like that of a true witch, was cluttered with bottles of perfume, lotion, and medicine. You never wrote or read there. You nearly always had a vaporizer going; you sprinkled eucalyptus drops into it. You said they helped you breathe. We used to record our conversations. You would press the red circle, like Japan's setting sun, and forget about it. I have a lot of, you know, I said, and you said, No, I don't know, you have a lot of a lot. You cackled like a bottomless well. Sometimes you would lie on the bed, and I would sit on the floor, crammed into the corner made by the wall and the door, because I was Rumply. We would listen to some song on repeat: Lucinda Williams' Essence, which we'd heard in the Duane Reade, or Hallelujah. It was to put our hearts back in the right place. It was to throw our pursuers into a deadend.

Once at the sink, I dropt a bowl and a plate, and my only thought was, Now I have fewer dishes to wash.

Then the other day, my tea kettle died. I made its last cup of tea for M. before the ballet on Saturday. In the night I threw it down the chute. I probably should have recycled it, but grief knows no such measures.

We were a cahoot by the name of John Clare. We had wit, we would astound, for we were young, and God's days were long. We had the run of the place in the palm of your Mother Africa hand. We were heathens, trundling each other about the premises in a wheelbarrow. The claws of our chimbleys were grubby with earth.

In what was a desperate measure for desperate people, we said, You oppress me, and we got out. We made a stage exit left, and returned home by a different road, and it took us "somewhere only we know." [1]

[1] Keane