She was freezing. Always freezing. Goddamn queen size bed that never warmed up with just one body in it. She stuck her icy hands between her thighs.
     If the thought had crossed her mind back then—in August, when the air conditioning wasn’t working and the humidity matched the temperature and it took less than three minutes for a stick of butter to ooze over the edge of the counter—if she’d had the presence of mind then to think about how she needed to steal Noel’s warmth all the nights between October and April, then she’d have let him take it. The bed. And bought one just big enough for herself, like the one she’d had when she was a kid. She’d always been warm then.
     She tugged the pillow down, pulled the comforter up over her nose, turned onto her side and stared at the liquid crystal numbers. Green. They used to be red, but this was a new clock. Noel had taken the old one. Along with the bureau that matched the bed, which was why he’d assumed he was getting the bed in the first place.
     “You take the bureau,” she’d told him, “I never did like it.”
     “Okay. Then I’ll take the bed, too, and you can keep the oriental since it’s probably too big for my apartment anyway.”
      If he hadn’t said ‘my apartment’ like that, hadn’t forced her to listen to the sound of it, imagine the shape of it, this separate space where he was going to be sleeping that night. In a room too small for the oriental, a room where he was sure he was going to be happier without her, maybe then she might have let him take it.
     “No, I want the bed.”
     He’d turned toward her with one of his you-make-no-sense looks. “Why do you want the bed, Phoebe? It’s the same wood as the bureau. Didn’t you just tell me you hate the bureau?”
     It was the way everything had been going for months.
     She’d looked at his Adam’s apple. She could remember a time when she found it sexy, the way it slid up and down his throat. Now it just looked grotesque. “What I said, Noel, was that I didn’t like the bureau. I didn’t say I hate it and I didn’t say anything about the wood.”
     Her hands were warming up. She didn’t let herself blink waiting for the green digital minutes to change from 08 to 09. Someone—a far removed cousin—had something to do with those numbers, with inventing the process. With changing, when you thought about it, the way people would see time forever. Three seventeen. Eleven forty-two.
     And do you know what time the dog began to bark, Mr. Hamchurian?
     At eleven forty-two.
     And how can you be so precise, sir?
     Well, because it was very late and I was trying to go to sleep and the barking was annoying. I looked at the clock next to my bed, and I remember it said eleven forty-two. Eleven, that’s my daughter’s age. I’m forty-two. That’s why I remembered it.
     She slid one hand down over the edge of the bed toward the floor, felt for the phone and drew the receiver back under the covers. She ducked her head under the comforter and pressed the numbers, green numbers like the clock. The receiver was freezing against her ear, making her newly warmed hand icy cold again. Why did winter have to come around so fast? Come to think of it, why did it have to come around at all? His phone rang four times, then there were fumbling noises, and while she waited through his five seconds of silence, she started feeling claustrophobic and pulled the comforter down under her chin again.
     The traffic light on the corner went from amber to red on the back of the closet door.
     It was one of those things she should be used to by now, the way he picked up the phone and always hesitated before he said hello. As if he was checking something out. Listening for background clues, trying to guess who it might be. She’d gotten used to other things. To the way he took butter off the top of the stick instead of off the end. To the way he always whistled under his breath. To the way he cracked all the spines on her books. She’d even gotten used to his friend Ira, the Jehovah’s Witness.
     But every time he picked up the phone and she heard that silence, she felt it in her throat—a feather of fear that he knew she was the one calling and this time had decided not to speak at all.
     “Hello?”
     It was more of a croak than a word, and she let her breath out into the phone. “I dreamed about him again tonight.”  Her warm lips moved against the cold mouthpiece.
     “What? Phoebe? Is that you? Phoebe, back off the phone. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
     “It’s the phone,” she said, but she moved back on the pillow a little. “You took the good one, remember?”
     “Phoebe, for Christ’s sake, do you know what time it is?”
     He was in a bad mood. He hardly ever swore. He was mad because she kept calling. Even though he’d told her she should. Made a very definite point of it, in fact. That last day when he was moving through the rooms like a burglar waiting to be caught, deciding what to put in his moving boxes. “Anytime...day or night, Phoeb... whenever you need to talk. I mean it.” Of course, he was feeling guilty then and he wasn’t feeling guilty anymore. Now he seemed to think two hours of conversation a week was too much to ask of someone, even someone who’d wasted six years, three months, and eighteen days of your life.
     She moved further back on the pillow so the phone was a good inch away from her lips. “I said I dreamed about him again tonight.”
     She heard him sigh.
     “I went to a sperm bank, Noel, and it was his sperm. They gave me David Letterman’s sperm.”
     “Phoebe...”
     She could tell he wasn’t lying down any more. He was sitting up. On a bed she’d never seen, in a room she’d never visited. Maybe next to a girl whose name she didn’t know, though she’d never asked if there was someone else. Wouldn’t.
     “Phoebe, you’ve got to stop doing this. Did you call Gelberg?”
     “Why? Why should I call Gelberg when I see him every day at work?”
     He said something under his breath.
     “What? What did you say?”
     “Nothing, Phoebe, I didn’t say anything.”
     But she knew better.
     “I’m going to call him then,” he said, “and I’m going to make an appointment with whoever he recommends, and then I’m going to pick you up and make sure you keep it.”
     “Fuck you,” she said, far enough away from the mouthpiece so it would be very very clear, and hung up.
     She got out of bed, even though it was still two hours to the alarm, felt around for her slippers in the dark, but all she did was kick them further under the bed. The floor was so cold, the bottoms of her feet were numb before she was half-way down the hall.
     “The world according to Schlieman,” she said, hugging herself on the toilet. “So I’m the crazy one. Me.”
     “Huh. At least Schlieman had an excuse.”
     She looked up, not as surprised as she thought she should be. It was Uncle Ezra sitting opposite her on the edge of the tub. She closed her knees. He shrugged.
     “Don’t bother,” he said, “it doesn’t do anything for me anymore. Besides, you’re my niece. I changed your diapers.” He leaned forward into the light from the street lamp. He looked much better than he did the last time she saw him.
     “You look better, Uncle Ezra,” she said.
     He shrugged again. “Huh…the last time you saw me I was dead.”
     They stared at each other.
     “Don’t ask,” he said. “You say Schlieman, the next thing I know I’m freezing my ass on the edge of a bathtub.”
     “I have two degrees in psycho-therapy,” she said, “and he wants me to see a psychiatrist.”
     “Maybe it’s not a given,” he said, “that one cancels out the other.”
     He coughed. His phlegm rattled. Somehow she was under the impression that once you died you should return to your best self. At the peak of good health and mental vigor. It didn’t seem right that Uncle Ezra should have that dirty cough for eternity.
     “I am not crazy,” she said. “My mother, she was crazy.”
     “And did you ever stop to think maybe that’s why she was crazy? Because she never talked to someone who could have stopped her before it was too late?”
     “I  am  not  crazy,” she repeated. “Close your eyes.” She wiped herself, flushed the toilet. She stopped in the doorway. “Uncle Ezra?”
     “What?”
     “Who was Schlieman?”
     He scratched his chin. “Schlieman was the butcher in the old neighborhood. When I was a boy your grandmother used to send me there every other day for a soup bone. She said he had nice soup bones. Left a little more meat on them than some.”
     “Why was the world according to him?”
     “Ah, because he was a butcher...” he held one finger up in the air, “...and an opinionated man. On top of that he had a cleaver with a five-inch blade, which he made use of to emphasize his points. ‘The world is too full of politicians!’ Wham. ‘The Dodgers will never leave Brooklyn!’ Wham. Now you tell me who’s going to argue with an opinionated man with a five inch cleaver.” His eyebrows slid up toward the fringe of gray hair across his head.
     She stared at him for a second, then she went into the living room and stuck a cassette in the VCR. She sat down on the sofa, wrapped herself in the afghan she crocheted while she was getting over the Lyme Disease. She picked up the remote and hit play, then mute. It was the way she liked to watch him, with no sound, nothing to distract her from looking at him. He threw a pencil at the camera and grinned. She decided she liked the gap in his front teeth after all. Sometimes she hated it. It was one of the things about him that drove her crazy. Like with Noel. And when she thought about it, she realized there were always things about people that drove her crazy. The way Noel snorted when he laughed. Letterman’s gap, his dopey faces. Gelberg’s bloody cuticles. The lights her mother used to leave on all over the house. The sound of her own voice on client tapes.
     She thought about Uncle Ezra sitting in the bathroom and tried to remember if she’d shut the light off when she left.

     Upstairs, the alarm clock was ringing and she opened her eyes. Sunlight was on her feet and the TV screen was bright blue. She lay there staring through the dusty sunlit air at the ceiling, while the decision she’d made just before she fell asleep came slowly back to her one thought at a time until it arrived at the gun on the top shelf of the bedroom closet and it hit her all over again that it was the only way she’d ever get him to do it.
     A little sperm, for Christ’s sake. A thing that ended up in all the wrong places most of the time. Worthless. Most of it. Most of the time.

     As soon as she walked into her office, even before she turned on the light, she saw the pink post-it note stuck on her video screen. She had an urge to pull it off and march into Gelberg’s office with the note stuck to the end of the revolver. She pressed her hand against her bag, felt the hardness of it through the woven cloth, imagined Gelberg with the barrel in his mouth, the post-it note sticking to his trembling chin. She’d tell him one more time. ‘You can leave these on my desk, Bernie. I’ll see them on my desk. I look at my desk. You don’t need to stick them on my screen. Because then I have to clean it. And it’s a stupid place to stick a post-it note, Bernie! A stupidstupid place!’
     She yanked it off. Phoebe, Make sure you come by my office before ten. I have to leave at 10:30 and won’t be back. Need to see you.
     She could positively smell Noel on this. He’d called Bernie. The rat. Both of them. Two rats. She stuck the note back on the screen, backed out of her office, shut off the light and closed the door softly. Out on the sidewalk, she hailed a cab. “Empire State Building,” she told the cabby, and he nodded and swerved into traffic.
     “It used to seem very tall.”
     She jumped a little. “Uncle Ezra, what are you doing here?”
     “But now…” he shrugged. “Not so big.”
     The cabby glanced at her in the rear view mirror.
     “It’s where I go,” she said, “it helps me think.”
     “And what about the gun in your bag. Does that help you think?”
     “It’s for protection.”
     “Puh. Protection. Just because you were born the night Kitty Genovese died…and your mother, who believed in signs…”
     “I’m not going to end up like her.”
     He shrugged. “Maybe it’s already too late.”
     “Kitty Genovese, Uncle Ezra. She’s the one I’m not going to end up like. Besides, it’s going to help get me what I want. I never get what I want.”
     “And you want...?”
     “Right now, I want you to leave me alone.”
     The cabby’s eyes met hers in the mirror. He looked away.
     “I’m not going to use it, Uncle Ezra,” she said. “I mean, I’m not going to fire it, okay?”
     But Uncle Ezra was gone.
     She rode the elevator up to the observation deck, cradling her bag against her breasts, and parked herself in a section facing Jersey. She  thought about how she was going to handle being a mother. She’d hope for a girl, but if it wasn’t, if it was a boy, at least then she could teach him to be different. He wouldn’t grow up to be insensitive and disloyal. If he started something, he’d finish it. He wouldn’t just play at being a man, he’d be one.
     “You think it’s easy?”
     “Go away Uncle Ezra.” She turned away, though she could see him reflected in the metal trim on a telescope.
     “It’s a free country, a free observation tower.”
     “You’re not supposed to be here at all. Go away.”
     “You think it’s easy?”
     “What, going away?”
     “Not going away. Being a man, Phoebe. You think it’s easy?”
     “A lot easier than being a woman.”
     He sighed. “Depends on your point of view.”
     “You think what he did was perfectly appropriate then.”
     “Appropriate aschmopriate. In my day, he’d have a piece of paper making it harder to leave. Still, a person can leave in different ways.”
     “You never left Aunt Sophie. You were married to her for fifty years.”
     “And I didn’t hear a word the woman said the last thirty-seven.”
     She faced his reflection. “So what are you trying to tell me? That I should have married him five years ago when he asked, when I had the chance? Tied him up nice and legal? Or are you telling me he had a perfect right to leave?”
     “I’m saying it’s the human condition. Dissatisfaction. Some of us make room for it, some of us don’t.”
     “I don’t need a lot to be happy,” she said.
     A middle-aged Asian couple came up beside her, right where Uncle Ezra was standing.
     “Hey,” she said.
     The man gave her a funny look and they moved off a couple of feet.
     “It doesn’t hurt,” Uncle Ezra said. “It’s like I’m an empty glass and they’re water.”
     “I can’t talk to you anymore,” she said, “I have to figure out how I’m going to do it. Go away, Uncle Ezra. Please, just go away.”
     She used a pay phone to call in sick for the next couple of days. She bought a soda and a bag of pretzels for lunch. She watched a troupe of girl scouts stepping on each other’s heels around the deck, and an old man wearing a hat just like Amelia Earhart’s. She made three and a half circuits of the city, stayed until three-thirty, and then she took a cab to Broadway.
     There was a long line in front of the Ed Sullivan theater, and with every minute that passed, the air grew colder and artificially brighter.
     Near a different door, where the ticket holders entered, a couple, a girl and a boy around seventeen or eighteen were arguing. A man carrying a bible walked by muttering to himself, and even in that cold wind she could smell him, rancid and yeasty. Two old women strolled arm in arm a ways behind him. They had identical red hair, identical fake fur coats and hats, identical painted faces. Old twins. She looked back at the arguers.
     The girl was facing the boy, and the boy was facing Phoebe, so all she could see of the girl was her back. She had a birthmark on one leg, on her calf, and Phoebe wondered how she could be out in this cold with her legs bare from her ankles to her thighs. She was wearing a little black skirt and narrow black pumps with tiny heels. And white socks that were folded down once with a trim of lace brushing the top of her instep. Like it was May instead of January.
     The socks made Phoebe think of the Catholic church down the street she used to sneak into on Sunday mornings. All the little girls wearing Mary Janes and socks with the lace trim folded down, the smell of sweet smoke in the air, the murmur of ah-mens, the washed light coming through the stained glass Virgin Mary.
     It was one of the things that had attracted her to Noel. “What am I, Phoebe? I don’t know...I guess I’m Catholic, at least that’s what I used to be.” She’d talked him into going to mass once, but it wasn’t the same. There was no incense, and the two little girls who were there wore jeans and sneakers, and instead of an organ there was somebody playing a guitar. It felt more like an intimate folk concert than something solemn and mysterious and dignified. Not the way she remembered it at all. Though Noel had ended up liking it, saying it was better that way.
     She looked at the birth mark on the girl’s leg and wondered how long it took her to not care about it. If she ever did care. Phoebe would care. She’d wear pants her whole life. And if she ever did wear a skirt, she’d wear tights, opaque tights. She’d never learn to swim. Never wear shorts. She used to think about killing herself every time she got a pimple. “What do you think?” her mother would say, “the whole world is watching you? You think the whole world cares you have bad skin?”
     The wail of a siren drowned out all the other sounds, and the man ahead of her in line did a little dance and the woman he was with put her head back and silently laughed.
     The arguers were still arguing, but something about them had changed. They’d gone stiff, arching away from each other and leaning in at the same time, reminding her of the geese her grandmother used to keep in the back yard.
     “Fuck you,” the boy yelled.
     The girl twirled, turning her back on him, and the little black shoulder bag she was wearing spun out and nailed him on the side of the face.
     “Bitch!” He grabbed for her, grabbed her hair, and she let out a scream. He pulled her backwards so fast her feet came away from the sidewalk. One of the little black pumps flew off.
     “Aw shit,” the dancer in front of Phoebe said.
     The boy spun the girl around, and in mid-spin she stopped being a person and turned into a rag doll, as though all her bones had melted. He hit her once, and he was about to hit her again when two men from the line ahead moved toward him. Then something flashed silver in his hand and the two men stopped.
     “Kill you, kill her,” he shouted, “I don’t fucking care!”
     Phoebe was hugging her bag, waiting for someone to do something. Something. The hard outline of the gun pressed against her stomach, and she looked at the girl, down on her knees now, sobbing, hysterical, looked at the knife the boy was waving toward her face.
     The gun was so cold it could have been made of ice. She slipped it out of her bag, aimed it, and the dancer swore and stepped away.
     “Leave her alone,” she said. Then she screamed it, “Leave her alone!” and everything slipped into slow motion. The way faces turned toward her. The way the boy looked up, the way his expression changed from fury to confusion.
     After it was over, after he’d run away and the cops had come, the gun had to be pried out of her hands, and later, half-way through the statement, she started shaking so violently the cup of coffee Sergeant Bulkowski had handed her flew all over his desk, all over his report, all over him. “It’s okay, Ma’am,” he kept saying mopping it up with tissues, “don’t worry, it’s okay it’s okay.”
     She stayed up rubbing cream into her aching hands until three in the morning, and when she finally fell asleep she dreamed honey bees were collecting on all the windows until the whole house went dark beneath the mass of their buzzing shaking bodies.
     When she woke up, the sunlight coming through the curtains was too bright, the radio alarm too loud, the feel of the sheets against her skin too heavy. Then the phone rang, and if she’d have been made of glass, the top of her head would have shattered.
     They wanted her on the show. That night. On the David Letterman Show. To talk about what had happened. Because audiences, the woman said, loved real life heroes, and besides, Mr. Letterman felt she deserved some recognition. They’d send a limo to pick her up.
     The rest of the phone calls she didn’t answer. She listened to their voices talk to her machine—Bernie Gelberg. Her mother.  Marisa, one of her clients. Even Noel called, called her for a change. And they all sounded unlike their real selves. Sounded almost...reverent. As though what she’d done had raised her to same crazy height in their esteem.
     Three reporters called, and a girl who said her name was Sherry. She wanted to thank Phoebe for saving her life. “I’ll call tonight,” she said, “I need to talk to you. I need to thank you.” And there was something in the not quite controlled shrillness of her voice that Phoebe recognized. Like a person who’d been abducted by aliens recognizing the same hysteria just under the surface of someone else who’d had the same experience.
     She decided to wear a black turtle neck, long-sleeved dress, because she knew it would be cold in the theater. She wasn’t nervous in the limo. She answered the driver’s polite questions. He was impressed. All of a sudden everyone was impressed. Even, for god’s sake, David Letterman.
     They put her in a room by herself. There were peanuts, cheese and crackers, coffee and tea and soda. She was to go on first, before the regular guests, before the Top Ten, and she watched the warm-up on a monitor. The band played. Uncle Ezra was on drums. She’d forgotten he played the drums.
     Letterman came out and the audience went wild. When he recounted what had happened in front of the theater the day before and told them she was going to be on, they went wild all over again.
     Her stomach started feeling like it was full of moving things. He asked if anyone had any questions for him. A woman wearing earmuffs asked if he’d been stopped for speeding lately and everyone howled, even though it wasn’t all that funny.
     Phoebe didn’t hear his answer, she was too busy watching him. He looked different. Older. And...goofy. Like a clown without a costume.
     Uncle Ezra had stopped playing the drums. He was holding up a cue card. Old Sperm, it said. She frowned. Old sperm. She’d never thought of that. She’d only thought of her own eggs getting older by the minute, but not that old. Not as old as Letterman’s sperm.
     A girl with spiky hair stuck her head in the door and smiled. “You’re on in fifteen minutes,” she said. “Everything okay? Anything I can get you?”
     Phoebe shook her head. And then after the door closed, she put on her coat and left.
     Outside, she started walking. The sun had set. It was windy, freezing. Grit blew off the sidewalk and into her eyes. Now what, she wondered, now what. A couple of blocks up, Uncle Ezra was reading a tabloid in front of a newsstand. Her picture was on the front page, a picture from the office Christmas party last year. She was smiling. Noel’s hand rested on her shoulder.
     “He wasn’t what I wanted after all,” she said.
     Uncle Ezra closed the newspaper and folded it, put it under his arm. “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll walk you home. And then, I have to go.”
     He put his arm around her. A touch so light, it was hardly a touch at all.