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girl when he’d met her at the University of Michigan. Her hair dark brown, glossy-brown, and her eyes bright and alert. Now, her hair had turned silver. It was really a remarkable hue, she had only to park her car, to walk along the sidewalk—here, on Trumbel Street—to draw eyes to her, startled and admiring.
    Ma’am, you are beautiful!
    Whatever age you are, ma’am — you lookin’ good .
    Ma’am — you someone I know, is you?
    These were women mostly. Smiling African American women.
    For this walk in Trenton she wore her good clothes. A widow’s tasteful clothes, black cashmere. And the cloche hat on her silvery hair. And good shoes—expensive Italian shoes she’d purchased in Rome, the previous summer traveling with her historian-husband.
    They’d also gone to Florence, Venice, Milano, Delphi. Her husband had brought along one of his numberless guidebooks—this one titled Mysteries of Delphi . She’d been astonished to see, superimposed upon photographs of the great ruined sites, transparencies indicating the richness of color of the original sites—primary colors of red and blue—and extraordinary ornamental detail that suggested human specificity instead of “classic” simplicity. Of course, Agnes should have known, but had never thought until her husband explained to her, that the ancient temples weren’t classics of austerity—pearl-colored, luminous, stark—but varicolored, even garish. Ruins had not always been ruins . Like most tourists she’d assumed that the ancient sites had always been, in essence, what they were at the present time. Like most tourists she hadn’t given much thought to what she was seeing and her ideas were naïve and uninformed. Her husband had said, The way people actually live is known only to them. They take their daily lives with them, they leave just remnants for historians to decode .
    He had opened that world of the past to her. And now, he himself had become past .
    She thought, He took everything with him. No one will remember who he was — or who I was .
    She was beginning to feel very strange. A lowering of blood pressure—she knew the sensation. Several times during the hospital vigil and after his death she’d come close to fainting, and twice she had found herself on the floor, dazed and uncomprehending. The sensation began with a darkening of vision, as color bleached out of the world; there came then a roaring in her ears, a feeling of utter sorrow, lostness, futility …
    At the intersection of 7th Street and Hammond, out of a corner bodega he stepped, carrying a six-pack of beer.
    He was older, of course. He must have been—nearly forty.
    His dark hair threaded with gray was longer than she recalled, his eyes were deep-socketed and red-lidded. His skin seemed darker, as if smudged. And he was wearing civilian clothes, not the bright blue prison uniform that had given to the most hulking inmates a look of clownishness—his clothes were cheaply stylish, a cranberry-colored shirt in a satiny fabric, open at the throat; baggy cargo pants, with deep pockets and a brass-buckle belt riding low on his narrow hips.
    She saw, in that instant: the narrowed eyes, the aquiline nose, the small trim mustache on the upper lip. And something new—through his left eyebrow, a wicked little zipperlike scar.
    He stopped dead in his tracks. He stared at her, and then very slowly he smiled as a light came up in his eyes, of crafty recollection.
    “Ma’am! You lookin’ good .”

L INDA Y ABLONSKY is the author of The Story of Junk: A Novel . As a journalist and critic, she covers the contemporary art world for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Artforum, W, Elle, Wallpaper , and other publications. Current projects include a memoir of life in New York during the 1970s, and a new novel.

jimmy o’brien
    by linda yablonsky
    O ver the winter of 1980, I caught hepatitis and had to stay home for a month. No drinking, the doctor said. He didn’t say anything about