Shadow of a Tiger

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You never see a Chinese drunk. Not in public. So I noticed the middle-aged Chinese man carrying his bottle in a paper bag down Ninth Avenue near Marais’s pawn shop. Maybe I should have seen an omen, a break in the natural order of things, but I was thinking about Marty, and the ring I was taking to the pawn shop.

Marty is my girl-at my age, a woman. Martine Adair, who understands me. The ring was the only good present I’d ever given her. It had been to the pawn shop before, but this time I was uneasy about it. Because of this morning.

“I’ve got to get away, Dan,” Marty said this morning. “Do something, anything. This awful heat.”

It was the end of July, hot enough to melt brass, but it wasn’t the heat on Marty’s mind. Something else. I heard it in those words-“Do something, anything.” Her show had just closed suddenly, she had no summer stock work. In three weeks the only work she had found was back taking off her clothes in one of the Third Street tourist clubs. She hadn’t had to do that in over two years. I had to understand her, too.

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