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By Root 12388 0

largely selfish, for I knew that if such a thing went on too often, I would get little sleep or peace. Another part that bothered me, though, was the strange quality of the event—the jolly athletic amour so obviously and exquisitely enjoyed, yet followed by the precipitous slide into rage, weeping and discontent. Then, too, what further got my goat was the matter of who was doing it to whom. I was irked that I should be thrust into this position of lubricious curiosity, that my introduction to any of my fellow tenants should not be anything so ordinary as a “Hi” and a straightforward handshake but an episode of pornographic eavesdropping upon two strangers whose faces I had never even seen. Despite the fantasy life I have described myself as having led so far during the course of my stay in the metropolis, I am not by nature a snoop; but the very proximity of the two lovers—after all, they had nearly come down on my head—made it impossible for me to avoid trying to discover their identity, and at the earliest feasible moment.

My problem was almost immediately solved when I met my first of Yetta’s tenants, who was standing in the downstairs hallway, going through the mail which the postman had left on a table near the entrance. He was an amorphously fleshed, slope-shouldered, rather ovoid-looking young man of about twenty-eight, with kinky brick-colored hair and that sullen brusqueness of manner of the New York indigene. During my first days in the city I thought it a manner so needlessly hostile that I was driven several times to acts of near-violence, until I came to realize that it was only one aspect of that tough carapace that urban beings draw about themselves, like an armadillo’s hide. I introduced myself politely—“Stingo’s the name”—while my fellow roomer thumbed through the mail, and for my pains, got the sound of steady adenoidal breathing. I felt a hot flash at the back of my neck, went numb around the lips, and wheeled about toward my room.

Then I heard him say, “This yours?” And as I turned he was holding up a letter. I could tell from the handwriting that it was from my father.

“Thanks,” I murmured in rage, grabbing the letter.

“You mind savin’ me the stamp?” he said. “I collect commemoratives.” He essayed something in the nature of a grin, not expansive but recognizably human. I made a humming noise and gave him a vaguely positive look.

“I’m Fink,” he said, “Morris Fink. I more or less take care of this place, especially when Yetta’s away, like she is this weekend. She went to visit her daughter in Canarsie.” He nodded in the direction of my door. “I see you got to live in the crater.”

“The crater?” I said.

“I lived there up until a week ago. When I moved out that’s how you got to move in. I called it the crater because it was like livin’ in a bomb crater with all that humpin’ they were doin’ in that room up above.”

There had been suddenly established a bond between Morris and me, and I relaxed, filled with inquisitive zeal. “How did you put up with it, for God’s sake? And tell me—who the hell are they?”

“It’s not so bad if you get them to move the bed. They do that—move it over toward the wall—and you can barely hear them humpin’. Then it’s over the bathroom. I got them to do that. Or him, that is. I got him to move it even though it’s her room. I insisted. I said Yetta would throw them both out if he didn’t, so he finally agreed. Now I guess he’s moved it back toward the window. He said something about it bein’ cooler there.” He paused to accept one of the cigarettes I had offered him. “What you should do is ask him to move the bed back toward the wall again.”

“I can’t do that,” I put in, “I just can’t go up to some guy, some stranger, and say—well, you know what I’d have to say to him. It would be terribly embarrassing. I just couldn’t. And which ones are they, anyway?”

“I’ll tell him if you’d like,” said Morris, with an air of assurance that I found appealing. “I’ll make him do it. Yetta can’t stand it around here if people annoy each other. That Landau is a weird one, all right, and he might