And, like Blondy and me at the movies, many weeks could pass between encounters.
Yet Sigismund Blondy, being who he was, found Zwelish all the more precious for his touchiness.
Blondy was busy then, in the effort that included our own first meeting, the Koch plays.
Now came the deep valley in their relations, though Blondy somehow never doubted it would eventually be crossed.
Blondy just nodded, needed no prompting to accept the truth of this account.
And also said that Zwelish himself had once halted on the sidewalk to take part in the latest Blondy-trashing session.
Was Zwelish doing anything urgent at the moment, or would he join Blondy for a walk to search them out?
As Sigismund Blondy saw him, Zwelish walked in a fiery aura of loneliness, but Blondy had got inside the penumbra.
Blondy, likely in his early sixties, always seemed to me terrifyingly vital, but those in their early sixties might suddenly fail.
Blondy was a part of the family if only because at the moment anyone, even a passing stranger, would have been.
Conveniently, Zwelish was alone when he next met Blondy on the street.
He lowered his shoulder as they came near each other, and, when Blondy said his name, he squared and delivered a sour look.
Likely, given his history with Zwelish already, Blondy knew it was reckless, though he did it wholly in gentleness and out of sheer enthusiasm.
Blondy looked relieved that I was chasing a moral in his fable, rather than staring with him into the black hole of his personality.
He seemed to have some imprecation caught in his throat and which produced a kind of angry hiccup as he glared up at Blondy.
In my rapidly evolving fantasy, Blondy became pitiable, myself a rescuer.
Did Blondy only fantasize that Zwelish peered out of his basement window slats deciding whether or not, on a given afternoon, he wanted to see Blondy?
No dice, not with Blondy, who launched one of his in-medias-res gambits (the equivalent, maybe, of a Max Frisch questionnaire): the parrots were missing, had Zwelish heard?
This prospect tipped Blondy back on his heels for an instant: that he, who prided himself on his panoramic insight into Seventy-eighth Street, could be himself under the microscope.
One of the dog-walkers, the most garrulous and multifariously connected (he walked the Jack Russell and the corgis and the aging dachshund), spilled it all to Blondy, at last.
Bearded when Blondy first noticed him, Zwelish shaved within a year or so, revealing features younger and grimmer than Blondy had guessed, a knuckly chin and somewhat sensuous lips.
Blondy was like a skater up his own river, a frozen ribbon the rest of us might have glimpsed through trees, from within a rink where we circled to tinny music.
One day when Doris was five or sixth months along and spring had broken out on the street, Blondy ran into her alone as she returned, waddling slightly, from the Korean market.
Again I felt a paranoiac certainty that in telling his tale Sigismund Blondy had enlisted me in a theatrical invention cast me in a role for the benefit of an unknown audience, perhaps only himself.
In the earlier months of this stalemate, Blondy had spotted Zwelish with or without his new family four or five times, then Doris alone with the boy in a stroller two or three others.
M. lobby on Seventy-ninth, or in the late-night Korean shop collecting, if you were Zwelish, a pack of cigarettes, or, if you were Blondy, a bottle of ginger beer or a packet of wasabi peanuts.
应用推荐