New York

There are only a couple more nights left of cable as Ernest, who paid for it, is no longer in his life. Angelo flips impatiently past Serengeti lions and Obama-arguing commentators to settle on a black and white courtroom scene from his grandmother’s generation, but it doesn’t make any sense as he’s ridiculously stoned.

The radiator bangs apocalyptically, his bedroom swelters, and he’s switching back to a reality show with Los Angeles teenagers when Leonora appears in the room.

Slithering slowly in through the half-closed door, she mews melancholically at the foot of the queen-sized bed. Looking at him with subtle recrimination, she pulls her enormous grey tabby frame up into the tangled sheets. Prowling across the bed to where he lies, she butts her proud face into his cheek, her snout cool and comforting against his face, unshaven since he lost his job the week before

Even the sun runs late in Paris. In the pre-bloom dark, from an unshuttered window five stories above the street, Thomas Early could hear the Turks on the sidewalk arguing about attar of Damask rose. In Turkey the production of attar is strictly regulated by a state-run collective, but these guys were rogue producers, distilling in moist cellars the fragrant oil that had, in the past, both started wars and ended them.

I took the elevator from triage to the main floor. I wasn’t supposed to have any liquids, much less a coffee and cigarette, but like that Miles guy in Risky Business, sometimes you just got to say, “What the fuck. Make your move…”
This orderly in the elevator. He looked me up and down—my gown was blue, and I had slipped my bare feet into some loafers I found on the bench outside the change area—and then his gaze fixed on my left ear. There was nothing to see there. The golf-ball-size wad of gauze was tucked between my brain and the inside of my skull.
“You got the look of life all around you,” the orderly said, talking to my ear. For no reason at all he said this.
“I need a coffee,” I said.
“Get you some fresh air on top of that. Worse you can do is hang around. This place’ll kill you. Two Brazilian girls run a café on the corner. Go out the exit and walk left one block. If you miss it, ask any dude you see.”

1. Veronica stormed off set and just kept going. She blotted her sweaty, heavily made up face with the linen scrap she kept in the pocket of her costume. Her costume, a copy of a gown worn by Madame de Montespan, a favorite mistress of Louis XIV, weighed fifty pounds. In the film, Summer Felicity, she does not play Madame de Montespan, but a fictional character named Felicity, the mistress of Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu, a renowned poet and wit of the 1680s. Craving solitude, she traipsed through a grove of sycamores, too embarrassed to acknowledge the prop girls downing Red Bull as they touched up the gold leaf on her palanquin. Fully aware of her mood, of the recent tabloids, of the rustling satin and dust cloud in her wake, they ignored her. Soon they were gone, and with them the klieg lights, the reggae blasting at craft services, and the director, perverted little Timmy, berating Dani, an ingénue ten years her junior.