Here’s more from my novel JUST ACROSS THE STREET IN NEW YORK CITY. Do you recognize parts of the Big Apple yet? February 2, 2022, the re-release date for the book moves a bit closer. Yeah!

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Mike finished shaving and tried to ignore the bags under his eyes. The Vietnam Memorial wasn’t what had kept him awake. He’d had Nicky dreams the previous night.

He shifted his tired mind to the divorce papers spread out on the dresser. Mike had wanted his marriage to work. When he had stood in front of the preacher in the white church in Somerset, New Jersey, saying “till death do us part,” he had meant it. But now, Mike didn’t know how he’d done the marriage thing for 19 years. If he didn’t resent Joanie so much for wasting years of his life, he’d thank her for kicking him out. Five more months and the divorce would be final if all the child custody details could be negotiated.

Mike put a tie in his coat pocket and locked the door behind him. He didn’t need his car to get to work, because the new bachelor apartment was only a bus ride across town to Liberty Tax at 29th Street and 2nd Avenue.

Mike’s shrink’s office at 6th and 59th was further from his new home. “What am I going to do with them for the summer?” he asked Pat Knolles during the week’s early evening session. He didn’t like the whining tone in his voice, but he couldn’t stop. “I mean, I love my kids, but I have a life of my own now. It’s not just work five days a week, and auditions and rehearsals. I’m a free man now. You know, I have women in my life. What am I supposed to do with two teenage girls?”

Pat leaned back in his naugahyde chair, crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray, and nodded. Ten months before, he’d run personality tests on Mike at the request of a divorce lawyer. The evaluation had shown Mike was neither a maniac nor a psychopath, to the disappointment of Joanie Levine.

After the court-ordered tests were out of the way and Mike had been authorized to spend time with his daughters, Pat had been surprised that Mike made a follow-up appointment, then another, and another.

In Pat’s humble opinion, Mike Levine was in the midst of emotional fallout from a family trauma. It was made worse because he complicated his life trying to be an actor when he had a better-than-average career as an accountant. But Pat Knolles didn’t try to change his clients. He just wanted them to be comfortable with their choices.

“They’re too old to send to summer camp,” Mike said to Pat who sat with his hands in his lap, listening. Mike paused, thought, and revised, “Or at least Fran is. Another year and she’ll be at college, using dope and screwing around.”

Pat tried not to smile and said, “Maybe she’s doing those things already, Mike.”

Mike harrumphed. “Just because I get laid several times a week, doesn’t mean my daughters fool around. They’re serious girls.” As soon as he said it, he looked at Pat for confirmation. What if Fran and Sherri were getting in trouble? What would he do? It would be Joanie’s fault, for destroying their home. Mike could feel his stomach tightening up.

He changed the subject, “I’ve got a date tonight. Do you want to hear the details about the one I had last night? And I mean ‘had’ her,” he added with pride. Flashes came to him of Bonnie crying out in pleasure.

“No,” Pat answered. He paused long enough to light a cigarette, letting his one word answer sink in. “I’m more interested in your sleep after sex. How are you coping with the dreams about young Nicky being shot while you two were roaming the woods?”

Mike shriveled. “The women always leave after we fuck, Pat. I don’t want to sleep with anyone. I’d die if one of them heard me gasping and crying during a dream. And when Sherri and Fran spend the night, well, you know, it wouldn’t be right for the girls to wake up in the morning with some bimbo in the apartment.”

“That’s what you think of them?”

“Well, sure. They need to respect their dad. They don’t need to know about my private life.”

“I was talking about the bimbos. You choose bimbos to have sex with?”

Mike rolled his eyes. Leave it to a shrink to latch onto some word and make a big deal out of it. “No, they’re not bimbos. That’s just a figure of speech. The one last night works at Peat Marwick. I mean, she’s a secretary, but she’s okay.”

“And the one tonight?”

Mike didn’t pay attention to the sarcasm behind the words “the one.” He answered, “I met her at a bar last week. I think she’s a designer or something.” The truth was, he didn’t know what Susie did for a living. But he recognized the twinkle in her eye when he bought her a gin and tonic at Gansevoort Rooftop Bar. “After a couple of drinks tonight, I won’t have to by her dinner. No doubt about it.”

They talked twenty minutes more, with Pat listening, nodding, and sometimes tossing out questions about Mike’s dates or his nightmares.

He liked Mike, and he told him so, “You’re a good-looking, intelligent man with a sense of humor and a medium-sized ego. That’s better than most of my clients.”

“Isn’t that a breach of ethics, or something, telling me that?” Mike quipped.

“I want us to talk more about your daughters, and how you’re going to handle them being with you all summer. But that’s for next week,” Pat said. Closing off the therapy session, Pat walked Mike to the door, patting him on the back.

§§

Marsha Winston had lived in Manhattan for almost 18 years, arriving for graduate school and never leaving. At first sight, she had fallen in love with New York’s cavernous valleys between the cliffs of buildings, the tunnels cut through the granite and brick, and the whirlwinds along the thoroughfares.

She learned the city by walking its streets, from Coliseum Book Store to the Metropolitan Museum, from Wall Street to Little Italy, up to Dykeman and the Cloisters, through the theater district and around the green market at Union Square. The streets were full of pedestrians who never looked at each other.

Marsha liked the general anonymity of the 15 million Manhattan residents. She saw familiar faces every day in her neighborhood and on her route to work, giving her a sense of community. People saw her come and go with grocery bags, and noticed her at the living room window when she watered and fed her roses. But she didn’t know them, they didn’t know her, and she liked it that way.

During high-school in Wisconsin, Marsha used to drive to the Piggly-Wiggly to buy two weeks’ worth of food for her and her dad, bringing it all home in the back of the SUV. But she had long-ago shifted to the grocery shopping ways of New York City, heading on foot to the Big Apple supermarket, and picking up a few things at the butcher shop or the fish shop on her way back. Sometimes, she bought enough to have it delivered, but usually, she kept it to one or two bags, light enough to haul home herself, just enough for a couple of days.

Today she was carrying home a bag with flank steak, sour cream, a package of dinner rolls, two potatoes, and an envelope of stroganoff mix. Tiny pale green leaves showed on the street’s tree branches, but she still had a clear view into apartments where curtains weren’t pulled. On a second floor window in the building on her left, she saw a woman with dark hair and a big nose, dancing with earphones on. On the right, on the first floor, an old lady stared out of her window, holding a tabby cat. When Marsha looked left again, she saw a man in a third-floor window, bare-chested, a glass in his hand. And next door to him, the woman in the orange vinyl chair watched television, as always.

She let herself into her building and unlocked the apartment door. She cooked, arranged herself on the couch with a plate of stroganoff and a glass of Zinfandel, and put Raiders Of The Lost Ark in the cassette player.

When the movie was finished, from her bedroom window, Marsha watched her landlady’s daughter stand in the backyard in the full-moon light that mixed with the security-lamp glare. She couldn’t figure out what the fat woman was doing out at 11:20 p.m.

She herself should have been sleeping because in the morning she had to meet with prospective replacements for her assistant Lonny Berne who was going on maternity leave in two weeks.

Marsha checked the rose bush next to her bed and murmured, “Aphids? You’re shitting me!” She pulled a small spray bottle of soapy water from the bedside table, spritzed the bugs she saw, and cleaned the leaves. Then she rubbed lotion on her hands and climbed into bed, opening the World Federation’s newsletter to see which cultivars were showcased this month. She was half-way through the details about Dr. Andrea Mansuino’s 1956 Aïda rose, when she heard stomping on the ceiling above her bed.

Then she heard a shrill voice, “You cow. You must think we’re rich. How can you eat so much?”

Marsha couldn’t imagine someone saying such a horrible thing. Lydia’s daughter was more than pudgy, she dressed as badly as her mother, and she was plain as a pig, but that didn’t mean she should be called mean names. Lydia’s voice seeped through the ceiling again, like venom coming through lace, “You’re a stupid blob. I can’t stand having you around.”

Hearing the mother scream at her grown child made Marsha cringe. She tried to turn her attention back to the journal, but her ears were on alert. She couldn’t hear whether the daughter replied. Marsha imagined dialing 911 to report child abuse, except she knew they’d laugh when she explained the child was in her 30’s.

She had dialed 911 years before when her own mother had collapsed in the kitchen, but her mom was dead before the ambulance got her to the emergency room.

Marsha had filled the sugar bowl from the bag on the shelf. Her mother loved morning coffee, loved it sweet and hot. Marsha had thought she was being a good girl, that she’d get praised and petted for filling up the sugar bowl.

But before Marsha sat down to eat breakfast, her mother had gasped and fallen out of her chair in a twitching heap, foam coming through her clinched teeth. The police took her father, her father the pharmacist. It had been his arsenic that had killed Ms. Winston, arsenic from the shelf, arsenic in his store’s paper bag.

For six months, Marsha had been too scared to tell what she’d done. She didn’t like living at her aunt’s house. Aunt Di didn’t make her wear long johns under her clothes like her mother did, but Aunt Di cooked scrambled eggs for lunch sandwiches. That was almost as bad.

Six-year-old Marsha wanted to go back to her own house, but she couldn’t as long as the police kept her daddy. So finally, she told about the sugar jar. She remembered crying in the office of the lady judge in black robes, repeating over and over again that she hadn’t known it was poison, that she hadn’t known.

She didn’t tell the judge that she was glad. If she had known enough to plan it, she would have. She hated the long johns her mother forced her to wear. She wanted to evaporate every time the girls in gym class made fun of her about those long johns. When her daddy finally came home, the poison seemed like a happy accident to Marsha. She promised herself she’d never wear long johns again. That was 30 years ago, and she had kept her promise.

“My knees are swollen, my hair’s falling out, I’m worn down to a nub, and I won’t take any more of your lazy stinking crap.” Lydia’s screeching brought Marsha back to the present. “You get your life together, or I’m putting you out of here, like I should’ve done years ago.” Marsha aimed her answer at the ceiling, “You’re a piece of shit, Lydia Duffy. Your daughter would be lucky to be rid of you.”