When Wallace Goes Out at Night
When Wallace goes out at night he pulls on the red pants, the flares, the faded cords he likes to wear, and he turns around to check how they look in the mirror from the back side.
Still fly.
When Wallace goes out at night he leaves a saucer of tuna fish on the doorstep for the neighborhood cats to eat. They’re watching him already from window boxes and drain pipes, ready to slink out of the shadows and feast as soon as he leaves. They know his routine.
When Wallace goes out at night all the old women throw open their kitchen windows and lean out into the alleyway hollering and stamping. “Give us a twirl, young man!” they shout, and he does, hardly breaking stride.
When Wallace goes out at night he orders a Diet Coke and gets busy on the dance floor. The regulars who know him leave him be, swaying tall and willowy, but now and again some kid will sidle up ready to make a mess of things, and that’s when Wallace knows it’s time to go.
Sweat dries into shivers in the late-night air as Wallace saunters down a fever-bright street. He stops at a bodega or, if it’s too crowded in there, slides into a booth at an all-night diner with Rod Stewart piping overhead. The waitress bustles over calling, “How ya been, darlin’?” but their coffee-stained conversation is all about her kids and her car and her shift until the hash browns are up, at which point she leaves him to it.
When Wallace goes out at night he stays out until the sky is a pastel watercolor, and a bell rings over the door as he steps out into the arms of a gentle morning. With one eye closed, he squints up at the buildings towering around him, where the frenetic lights of the night before have settled into solid shapes again. Crinkling open a complimentary peppermint, he thinks back to another time, a chain of jagged nights when he would glower up at a bitter-cold sky and murmur, “There has to be more—there has to be,” never imagining then how apricot-soft a morning could feel.
Wallace ambles homeward with his hands in his pockets. The old women have all let down their checkered curtains or latched their shutters against the alley; he plucks a geranium from a window box and sticks it in the gingerbread frame of Mrs. Gerardi’s screen door. One lithe tabby cat still lounges on his stoop even though the saucer has long since been licked clean.
When Wallace comes home in the morning he lands heavy on a ratty mustard-colored armchair, lets his head fall back, and closes his eyes. As he drapes his arm over his face and sleep descends, next door Mrs. Santini pulls up her yellowed window shades and starts her day in song.