(Work in progress) (return home) Everything instant. Nothing takes time. Surgery, drone bombs, virtue of stupidity. Upside no risk, downside no change. Not really a downside. Prefer more of same anyway. Emptiness of imaginary roast chicken dinner. Tantalus by the seashore, getting laid in his head. Imagine Henry Corn, rust-colored hair cut close on the temples but curly on top, somewhat grimy but fashionably narrow white collar close on the throat, sometime in what we call the Tammany Era, stepping out of a marble mansion on Fifth Avenue into the passing St. Patrick's Day parade. He holds one carefully loose arm around Marion Hammer, the daughter of the mansion's owner. Her hips flare out like a tropical flower, too wide for her sudden waist, and her flanks shift sideways under a tight black skirt with an incongruously serpentine rhythm. Despite all the raspberry phosphates and speakeasy so-called whisky he's spent months pouring down her throat, and the nights they've stayed up in ghastly gas-lit Broadway diners over black-edged pastrami and eggs confronting the fate of the League of Nations and what it means to be a modern man on the precipice of a godless death, and despite the sour aura of sexual passion unfulfilled that pervades her every movement, mood, and jagged, jet-black eyebrow lift, when it comes to the point, he can't quite connect. She's like a wall covered in trompe l'oeil windows. So it's unclear in what sense he's got his arm around her--whether it's the possessive gesture of a man over a woman he will possess, or merely one friend helping another down slippery white marble steps--or by what right, and he balances in the ambiguity uneasily, holding his elbow rigid with affected coolness and trying not to sweat. The noise of the parade is a second, concurrent parade, a bright ocean rolling over blue jackets and brown rifle butts and Christmas-colored kilts, with a hundred thousand shifting feet forming the obscurity of its deeps, and ten thousand marching steps the roll of its broader waves, and the murmur of voices, the meaning of their words denatured by their very multitude, its spume, and the reedy melody of "The Minstrel Boy" cutting, like a seagull's shriek, through everything else to the gutter or beach where, behind three rows of other spectators, Henry and Marion take their places. A tall, veal-colored Swede holds his son by the shoulder next to an Italian-eyed patrolman with a ruddy, beery glow and green ribbon on his breast, in front of three bohemians with pre-War facial hair (the gents) and a close-fitting cap (the flapper), in front of a widow in a rose-colored beret and her daughter just old enough to feel burdened by her mother's overbearing solicitude, as they watch a bass-drum leading bagpipes marching by. Mr. Hammer wouldn't even shake hands with a man in a business meeting, lest some contract or commitment be later pinned to the gesture, but he had put his hands on Henry's shoulders, pulled out a seat for him himself at his own long table, under a gilded little domed ceiling just like J.P. Morgan's, and noted approvingly how Henry stood up when Marion went to powder her nose without interrupting himself as he claimed in false, florid detail that Eugene Onegin was his favorite book. It was the only title he could think of. He had, in fact, read some of it. And based, apparently, only on this and on Henry's reciprocation of his own bright brandied eye-warmth, a gesture far easier to misconstrue than any handshake--whose meaning might be doubted, but whose material presence or absence, at least, was about as clear as anything in our uncertain world--Mr. Hammer had left his formal dining room empty for his daughter to return to alone and taken Henry into a mahogany panelled study and then left him, too, alone, standing in an uncomfortably deep red carpet, while he ducked into the cedar-lined closet to open his safe. He came back with a blue velvet box, a beautiful royal blue, thick as the carpet they were standing on, and Henry asked himself how bargains ever get made in this world when both parties stand to lose all their power at the moment of exchange. But when he looked into old man Hammer's eyes, he saw a reflection of a reflection of the old man himself, colors made more vivid and lines sharper by the reduction--Hammer as he appeared to himself reflected in Henry's eyes. And so Henry let Hammer press the box into his hand. Of course, always pay later for hamburgers today. "Think about it," Hammer said. Or maybe call him Szandor Block. Importance of names. Only chance to make a first impression. Marion Hammer and Szandor Block. Szandor did not think about it. Nothing to do except keep calling tunes till the fiddler goes on strike. He simply went back to find Marion in the breakfast room, shades drawn now and yellow light pouring through yellow glass onto eggshell white walls, ready to go, fastening the pearl-button cuffs of her blouse, and he clicked open the blue box--click!--took out a string of pearls, and fastened the pearls around her neck. There was a subtle interaction of colors: the necklace made the hollow of her throat pinker by contrast or yellower by echo, depending on the direction of the light, but Block did not notice, because Block did not look. He put the string around her neck and his arm around her waist and guided her down the white marble steps to the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue to watch the passing parade. Pearls are warm--they change color like skin--but the strand's as-yet unsmudged clasp was only gold. It glittered like metal and shone like metal, softening nothing, without remorse, incarnating the alluring false permanence of death. A mounted brigade of Fenians approached with a hot wave of horse stink, and the ruddy patrolman stretched out his arms and stepped back. So the veal-colored Swede took his boy by the shoulder and also stepped back, and he bumped into the three bohemians, who then also stepped back, and they bumped into the widowed mother in the rose beret--who was not actually widowed but merely abandoned, but though being a widow had more tone--who also stepped back, and she stepped onto Marion's foot, and Marion yelped and stooped over. Henry Corn had the boneless fingers of a thief. Picking pockets was not something he'd ever started; it was just something he did, like taking candies from an open dish on someone's coffee table. The only possible pertinent act of will was to refrain--otherwise it was just like breathing. The closet in his bedroom in his mother's apartment on Hester Street contained fourteen umbrellas, eleven gold watches, several battered library books, and sixty or seventy wallets. Not fair to suggest that Szandor didn't read--he just never minded the titles. Click!