Crossroads by Mary Morris

seen real action. But he spent nine months inside a radio station, reading off lists of dead and MIAs and POWs in between the Stones and Roberta Flack, and the greatest effect it had on him was that he’d lost the ability to be indoors for long.
    He loved to window shop. “I’m a consumer,” he said as we passed a head shop. “Everything I see, I want to buy.”
    â€œI always buy things I don’t really want.”
    He shook his head as we paused in front of an antique store. There was a walnut chest in the window he said he liked. He knew it was walnut because of the grain and the color. “I like walnut and oak best,” he said. “What do you like?”
    â€œFormica.” I was a little annoyed.
    He laughed and said that sometimes he found me very funny.
    â€œYou know, if you’ve never just walked to Times Square for the hell of it, it’ll do you good,” he said, as he started walking. At Lincoln Center we bought some ice cream cones at an outdoor Italian cafe on Broadway. “Why will it do me good?” I didn’t see anything good about spending the evening walking around Manhattan when the humidity was 94 percent and the temperature about the same. “It’s very hot. Why don’t we just sit in front of Lincoln Center and watch everyone go to the opera?”
    â€œYou’re an urban planner. And you don’t experience the city. It doesn’t make sense.”
    â€œI don’t need to experience anything. I look at maps. They tell me what I need to know. I look at charts; they tell me how many people live somewhere, walk somewhere, how many cars go by in an hour, and so on. Then I write elaborate grant
proposals for millions of dollars based on those facts.” I was being glib and stubborn. In truth, a large part of my time was spent examining neighborhoods and writing rather emotional reports about urban conditions.
    â€œIn other words, you wouldn’t go to Times Square unless you had tickets for a show?”
    â€œThat’s about right.”
    â€œWell, a change will be good for you.” I wasn’t sure I liked being told what would be good for me, but lately I wasn’t necessarily the best judge anyway. Sean wanted to see the night life up close. He wanted to feel the pulse of the city, get its filth all over his shirt, his neck, his hands. “I always know when I’ve been to Manhattan,” he said. “My shirt gets dirty in half an hour.”
    Two transvestites and a bag lady passed us. The neighborhood was starting to change. Street people appeared, the emaciated kind who took drugs. Panhandlers. People with no place to go. And no one to go to. We passed a peepshow and Sean stopped. “Have you ever been inside one of these?”
    I shrugged my shoulders. “It really doesn’t interest me.”
    â€œHave you ever been inside?”
    â€œLet’s go somewhere nice, O.K.?”
    â€œWe’ll go somewhere nice but I’d just like to see what it looks like inside one of these places.”
    â€œI think,” I said, “that this is one of those things in life I can live without.”
    But he was already handing a few dollars for admission to the shriveled lady with no teeth and very little hair, and we walked into a room filled with little booths, the kind you take four pictures in for a quarter. Some of the booths had their curtains closed and I could see pairs of shiny shoes that businessmen wear. I decided I was in no immediate danger. We picked a booth, closed the curtain, and dropped a quarter into the slot. “Do you do this often?” I asked Sean.
    â€œEvery chance I get.” We both peered into the movieola as the film began. It was an eight-millimeter, home-type movie that seemed to have some kind of plot. A woman is devastatingly drawn to another man’s male lover. The man seems to be her husband or fiance. While the men are willing to fondle and