Cardinal Numbers: Stories by Hob Broun Read Free Book Online

cabbies just short of a doctorate, waitresses studying with Merce Cunningham. Riley is grateful to be spared.
    Today, for OTL, before even removing his parka, he does “I Joined an Abortion Club” and “My Daughter Is Trying to Kill Me.”
    ACCORDING to his only source, her niece, a sous-chef, she’s gone to look after her Connecticut grandfather. Will her name and the town’s be enough on the envelope? He fills three pages, but it’s a letter to someone else. He looks at the perforations of a stamp and wonders how they are made.
    Watching Million Dollar Movie is sad also. How she would fill in dialogue of her own, hang on the most obvious plots. Her lips pulled back in concentration, like safety padding over crooked teeth. He gets up to look for the nail clipper, orders himself back down. To make this into the pathos that comes quickly and easily, he tries to think what her grandfather is thinking.
    The bedroom is an oblong perpendicular to the hall. A single window, off center, overlooks the street. From this height it is barely possible to read an address painted on a trash can. A mirror is the oldest thing in the room, its silvering eaten away at two corners. Under the bed, in a chronology of blue, yellow, white, are hardened knobs of Kleenex. The clock face glows in the dark.
    RILEY studies while riding. The texts of cycling posture: racers sleek and low over their handlebars veer in and out of the traffic pack; casuals pedal with arms folded, rock to bunge-corded radios; dutifuls stiff-armed and high in the saddle badge themselves with filtration masks, crash helmets. Riley, though, is a neutral, his three-speed unfashionably thick, his text pared to one word: conveyance. Passing over the invariable route—down Ninth Avenue, east on Fourteenth Street, the bins of cook pots and rubber sandals already pawed through, south again on Broadway—he holds in mental foreground his image of the wheeling masses of Beijing.
    Moretti snaps pencils; he pleads and paces. T/C has to be at the typesetter’s by three, and Riley has just now begun the feature. “PLO Using Mind Control.” Riley abandons his lead, rolls in a fresh sheet. Moretti groans. Mrs. Vega, the Subscription Department, goes downstairs for more milk.
    Lina comes out of the file room, biting her lip.
    Riley glances. “How recently were they used?”
    “Three issues ago. But I can crop differently.”
    With the Pratt students who come in to do paste-up, Lina is the Art Department.
    “This one—the hands out—I thought might go as a psychic trance.”
    Lina is so dark: her eyes, hair, skin, a round depth to her voice. She is very small, very serious. She wears plain black clothes. Her people are Calabrese.
    “I don’t know. He looks ill.”
    Lina and Riley would sleep together, but thinking about it, they agree, is better. The work abets. Editing, doing captions at opposite ends of a desk, they are thinking about it all the time.
    “No panic. I’ll look some more.”
    And Lina adores her husband, who is shy because of his faulty English, blind in one eye and retired from boxing.
    Riley finishes just before two and goes for lunch. Wendell, the Advertising Department, takes him for pastrami, then talks too much to eat. The great Park Row press wars. The scoops, hoaxes, flash bars.
    “See? It was right out there.”
    Wendell points to the corner cut-rate luggage store. Probably it had once been a saloon; possibly an editor had been shot in the doorway over a love nest scandal. But Wendell lives with his mother and romances a time before he was born. He is as hopeful as anyone wanting to add bustline inches, to lose weight while sleeping. Transformation is real to him. Instant $$$—song poems wanted. Sharpen saws at home—be your own boss.
    Riley says, “I bet there isn’t a thing you’d rather be doing.”
    Wendell grins, tips heavily.
    Too many coffees at La Campaña. The caffeine, the glucose … Riley’s problem is not his inability to sleep but