THE THIRTY-FOURTH PAGE

This was on or about the time of the wife. She, too, had come from another place to find her true self, which could not be found in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Her having arrived from a couple of hundred miles from the city was no different from my coming from a couple of thousand miles away.

She had come to New York about ten years after I arrived and settled in a Murray Hill tenement with a bunch of other Jersey tomatoes. She later told me that on a rainy day she felt as if she was in a noir film of the forties when she walked down Madison in the rain where everything was black and white. It was the feeling I had had about an earlier era in Brooklyn Heights when I arrived on p. 8.

After a stint behind one of the perfume counters at Bloomingdale’s and while receiving guests in the lobby of a theatrical agency, she got a tiny part in a film being shot on the East Side. This led to more minor movie work and modeling. You may never have seen her face, but you’ve seen her hands in a hundred television commercials.

Her hands took her away from gang living and out of Murray Hill to the Village, where she purchased my novel in a used bookstore long after the Unknown Book had become a sad little footnote in publishing history. What compelled her to select my book as her reading book for that year long remained a mystery.