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She glanced at the launch again. Something about it. What? She wrinkled her brow. She didn’t know. She turned back to the couple and struggled to recover:

“How about a contemporary in Greenwich?”

The strangeness pursued her. Later in the day, the deal done, papers signed, Freeboard found herself walking to Manhattan’s last Automat, where she sat at a speckled-beige table with a heaping plate of steaming white rice and baked beans, stirred and mixed them together and ate them ravenously. For her drink she’d taken wedges of lemon that were meant for iced tea from an open bin, squeezed the juice into a glass filled with ice and cold water and now added sugar from a shaker on the table, just as she had done in her impoverished teens. The rice and beans filled her warmly now. Had they not she might have filled an empty bowl with hot water, added salt and gobs of catsup from the bottle on her table, then stirred it to smoothness: tomato soup. Why am I doing this? she wondered. She looked over at the banks of small-windowed compartments of food that would unlock when fed coins through a slot. She was searching for the hot apple pie with rum sauce. Once a March wind had blown a dollar to her chest and that was the day she’d been able to afford it. Where was it? Perhaps she had room for one bite.

“You come here often?”

Freeboard shifted her glance to the homeless bum now seated across from her like a curse. His greasy gray hair flowed down to his shoulders and he wore an old oversized army overcoat, a soiled denim shirt and khaki pants.

“Ya look like an actress. Ever done any actin’? I’m a castin’ agent,” the bum asserted. He smelled of stale wine and the air of packing crates and of doorways and steamy grates. A big toe poked up through a hole in his sneaker. The nail needed clipping.

“Also a producer,” he added urbanely.

“Yeah, right, you remind me of David O’Selznick.”

“Remind? Who the hell ya think you’re talkin’ to, kiddo? Show a little respect here, okay? Show some class. I see ya ain’t got no money for food. I could help you.”

“You look like you could use a little help yourself.”

Something stirred in the old bum’s eyes, some buried recollection of another life. He leaned in to Freeboard, his jaw jutting forward. “It ain’t over,” he defied her, “till the fat lady sings.”

Stifling a smile of me and compassion, the realtor looked down into her blue leather purse, plucked out something from her wallet and slid it across the beige table to the bum.

“I think you must have dropped this, Mr. O’Selznick.”

It was a one-hundred-dollar bill.

“A C-note!”

Freeboard stood up and she turned to leave.

“Just a second,” said the bum.

The realtor looked back at him.

“I charge two hundred dollars for interviews.”

Freeboard nodded, appraising him fondly, as if she had met a kindred spirit. An image of her alcoholic father flashed to mind, harshly slapping at her six-year-old’s face until it purpled. “You gonna do what I tell you now, bitch?” “No!” “Attaway, old champ,” approved the Realtor. “Go get ‘em. Don’t ever let the bastards get you down, keep on fighting.” Then she turned and prided out into the jostling street where the rumble of trucks, the gasp of buses braking, and the strident honking of horns and the dreams, the hurts, the spites, the fears, the schemes of the hellbent crush of pedestrians rushing for their trains hit her psyche like a wave that washed away from her mind all clouds, all webs, all thoughts that had nattered at its edge, unfocused, and recharged her with the energy that made her Joan Freeboard, child-woman on the make, do or die.

Do or die.

That night in her penthouse on Central Park West, the only sound was the scuffing of soft leather slippers over wide-planked polished oaken floors as the Realtor, in a belted forest-green bathrobe, pensively wandered from room to room mulling over a curious proposition that had walked her way a few days before:

“Did I hear you say twenty percent?”

“You did.”

“What’s the catch?”

“My clients want the best. That’s you.”

“But you told me nothing’s happened