A warm day in June, 1972, drinking mimosas and eating Eggs Florentine on Tar Beach, Anna said she wanted to go to Poland.

"Nah, Poland," said Singe Le Fleur derisively, "I want to go to Bulgaria."

"I want to go to Albania," Alan growled. Alan always growled when he spoke.

Such a great name, Singe Le Fleur, thought Masie to the side, as she wondered where she wanted to go this summer. Singe was a brilliant and jolly person who critiqued science fiction books. She would die fairly young and very soon. Singe had a foreign accent that, despite her last name, never sounded French, but of some mysterious Eastern European hodgepodge language.

"I want to go to the South of France," Masie said and saw she had let them down. Anna and all her friends were wild for Eastern Europe. Anna, although she was a successful painter, had gotten a PhD in political movements among the Serbo-Croatian peasantry. When Masie thought of Europe, she thought of sidewalk cafes, of bookstands along the Seine, of Zelda Fitzgerald and Sarah Murphy and Josephine Baker.

The soft, clean Sunday air was a rare treat over Jane Street, where Anna's studio sat, a very small tarpaper shack, really, on a large expanse of Village rooftop. Anna had pots of flowers everywhere and climbing honeysuckle lost among very old vines of ivy. The building was only one story high and the adjacent buildings much taller. From three sides of Anna's rooftop rose sheer old brick walls. None of the walls had windows, or if they had, the ivy had latched on and spread over them.

Across the street was a large 1920s apartment building with hundreds of windows overlooking Anna's rooftop. But she had all chairs angled away from the front, so that it was like sitting in a green bower. The sun was overhead for only a brief period. The rest of the day, a watery green seemed to tint the air and reflect onto every surface.

Anna watched Masie stretching in the sun for a moment. Singe caught on and started watching Masie, too. Alan always watched everyone. Masie was accustomed to being watched by these intellectuals. She knew it was because she was young and golden and knew no extraneous languages.

Anna asked, "What about Sardinia? Would you go to Sardinia?"

"Yes," said Masie, "I would go back there."

Singe said, "Oh, were you in Sardinia?"

Singe was a perfectly nice person with a kind heart, but Masie heard in her throaty voice a kind of surprise that Masie might have ever traveled anywhere.

"Okay, Coney Island, then," Masie said. "Today, we could go today."

Alan said, "Masie, be nice."

Ignoring her and him, Anna said, "Yes, Singe, we were there together."

Masie added, to be nice, "We had a little whitewashed house, with a grape arbor, and pigs in the yard."

Anna said, "There were lilies growing out of the sand on the beach."

"Our landlady was named Fructosa," Masie told Singe. "I think you should change your name to Fructosa Le Fleur."

Singe laughed heartily and said, "Coney Island, it is."

By mid-July, poor Singe was dead and Anna bereft. They had been friends since Columbia in the 1950s, when they were Communists together, with the cell names of Muffy and Puffy. To console her, Alan took Anna to France to visit Singe's grave. Masie found herself alone in New York for the month of August, truly alone; every single person she knew was gone somewhere. She tried to think of where she wanted to go, but started liking the unaccustomed quiet and space of Manhattan in summer. She beat the heat and humidity by visiting Anna's rooftop in the early morning and staying until night. After a few days she moved over some clothes from her dorm room, bought some food, and considered herself on vacation.

Anna's library was in five languages, ranging from French to Serb, and very intimidating to Masie. She took a week's vacation money and spent it at the 8th Street Book Store on piles of Edith Wharton, all six of Jane Austen, and a few of Jack Kerouac. Her arms laden with the heavy bags, a man held the door open for her. He was older and slim, delicate looking, with a still handsome face. He wore a lightweight suit, with a white shirt and tie, which you didn't see much on summer weekends in New York.

"Ethan Frome is the only good book Wharton ever wrote and Kerouac was a no-talent poseur. Ah, but Jane."

Masie thought it awfully forward of this person to criticize her reading tastes, but she had grown used to something about this big city; it was a collection of small towns. It was not unusual for perfect strangers to act as if they'd known you all your life. She nodded and went on her way. She was seeing the summer stretching before her, reading in a comfy chaise lounge, taking long solitary walks along the Hudson River on Sunday evenings.

She hurried home to Anna's rooftop.

It was perfect, just as Masie thought it would be. She was deep into Jane Austen and felt as if she were living between the pages, that her ivy-covered nest was a leafy bower in the New Forest. For exercise, she took to walking 45 minutes at a time along the perimeter of the roof. She had no desire to actually go anywhere. For the first two weeks she'd been out only to buy newspapers, some food and wine, and once for a cheeseburger at the Corner Bistro a half-block away. For diversion she was happy to peer over the front balustrade at passers-by below.

Then one day, for some reason, she was restless, and the three green walls seemed to close in on her. In a decisive move, she turned her chair to face north and the Van Gogh apartment building with its many windows. For the first time, she considered how Anna's rooftop must appear to her neighbors; especially at night in lantern light, it was a tiny stage and every event on it an act in a small play. What dramas of the City had the Van Gogh witnessed on Anna's rooftop?

As if to confirm the presence of an audience, Masie became aware of an old woman sitting in one window on the third floor and staring down at her. Slowly moving her eyes along the front of the Van Gogh from window to window, Masie spied others. The higher up the windows, the less certain Masie could be the viewers were watching her, but of the old woman on the third floor there was no question. Masie had an urge to turn her chair, but then thought, well, I want to be an actress, so I will act as if I am reading a book in a chaise lounge on a rooftop. She smiled to herself and thought no more about it until two days later.

She heard a voice calling, "Hello, up there! Anybody up there on the roof?"

At first she sat stunned out of her little world, resentful at the intrusion, and thinking she would not answer. But the man kept shouting, so she did go over to the edge and look down. He said he was investigating a death at this address, a suicide. Did she know anything about the man who had lived here before her? Why, no, Masie told him, she didn't live there herself and the person who did was out of the country. But she had never heard of such a thing.

"How did he do it?" she asked.

"Jumped," the man said.

Masie was chilled at this, but curious, too. It was one very short story down. There was only an unused garage in the rest of the building. It seemed an unlikely height from which to commit suicide. Just then the doorman at the Van Gogh called across to the man from the insurance company, "It's true!" The investigator dropped Masie like a hot potato and crossed the street. She stood there hunched over the balustrade trying to hear more, but they soon went inside the lobby.

When she raised her eyes she looked straight into the window directly across the way on the level of her roof. She saw a familiar man. He sketched a small wave toward her and turned away. Looking up, she saw the old woman on the third floor in her usual spot. She was nodding affirmatively at Masie. Then from behind her, came a young man whose dark looks and high cheekbones struck Masie as intensely interesting. The young man had powerful arms and shoulders in his black t-shirt. He lifted the woman and as he did, his dark eyes met Masie's blue ones.

She quickly ducked her head and turned her back, leaning against the balustrade. She started reading a letter she had received that day from Anna. In Paris, Anna and Alan had met up with Tom, Anna's lover, a chemist from New York, who had been traveling for months and had fallen in love with a Russian woman named Anya.

"He chose her because of the name," Anna complained. She didn't seem too put out, Masie noticed. But then, she couldn't very well be, what with her status as the long time mistress of Alan. Tom had accepted Alan and now Anna would have to accept Anya. This did not mean that Anya would accept any of them. She didn't like them, she told Tom, and refused to meet them for dinner. Tom put her on a train and that was the last they saw of Anya.

The letter was started and stopped by Anna every few days, so Masie was able to keep up with the progress of events. Anna said she had grown concerned that Alan's health was not quite right. He was much older than she and he seemed to be slowing down considerably. Alan was an economist who had been blacklisted in the 1950s. Masie was unsure if Alan never worked, because nobody would hire him, or because he had grown used to the idea over the past twenty years. In any case, Anna and Tom willingly supported Alan, who lived in a furnished room in New Haven with his 9700 books.

In Paris, Alan was staying with his English friend, Paul, a reporter for Le Monde, who had just published a book on Paris bistros. But now, Paul wanted to sell his country house a few miles outside Paris and Anna was determined to buy it for the ménage a trois to live in.

Alan was tired of city living, Tom's profession could follow him anywhere, and there was a perfect outbuilding for Anna's painting studio. Did Masie want to come to France and live with them? If not, did she want to sublet the apartment for two years until the lease ran out?

Good Lord, thought Masie, these people: At ease anywhere in the world. Masie was reminded that she had wanted to go to school in Ithaca, but her father, a professor there, insisted she spend her college years in the big city. "Get some polish," he said, "some sophistication. Learn something of the world." He hadn't wanted her to live at the NYU dorm, either, but in an apartment in the Village, where he had lived as a student. "You want to know the artists while you're young, Masie, the creators. The rest of the world can come later, and will. Nobody escapes it forever."

By "it," she had known he meant conventional life, suburbs, babies, and lawns to mow, which was everything the young Masie wanted in life. But to make him happy, and because he was paying for it, she came to New York for the acting school. She did convince him she was frightened of not living in a dorm and he conceded the point. She earned spending money doing modeling jobs here and there, which is how she met Anna. Last year she had a job for Anna all summer long in Sardinia. Masie was supposed to model and to cook, too, but Anna soon saw it was useless. Anna loved to cook, anyway. Anna loved to dance, and sew, and do yoga, husk corn, pick berries, folk dance, make love with peasant men in any land, and sing off tune.

Before Masie left for Europe, her father took Masie and Anna out to dinner at One Fifth Avenue. Masie loved the interior of the restaurant, which had the look and feel of a luxury liner. Anna was so joyful and sparkling and fascinating that night, Masie watched her widowed father fall in love before her eyes. Anna blithely told him she already had two husbands and hadn't time for another. Masie was relieved. Anna as an employer and a mentor in the ways of the world was one thing, but as a mother? By the end of that summer in Sardinia, Masie and Anna were good friends, with Anna as some kind of older sister, looking out for the hayseed in the wicked city.

Now here was Anna offering her a new world, two new worlds. She could leave school and live in Europe. She could stay in school and live in a Greenwich Village apartment and be a real New Yorker. Neither option frightened Masie, as it would have only two years earlier. This surprised her a little. Her father would be pleased to pay the rent. Her walk to school would only be a few blocks longer. She glanced up and saw the old woman nodding at her from the third floor of the Van Gogh. Masie smiled, thinking, I guess that's a vote.

She knew now the woman was senile and that the man on the second floor was her son. He had rung Masie's doorbell earlier in the day with Anna's letter, which had been delivered in error to the Van Gogh. The doorman, he claimed, had asked him to bring it over. The doorman himself was standing under the Van Gogh awning and nodding in confirmation. Anna wondered briefly why the doorman hadn't crossed the narrow street himself with the letter; he was often short distances away from his post. But she was distracted by the man standing in front of her, who, she suddenly realized, was the man from the bookstore who had the nerve to say Edith Wharton had written only one good book.

Goodness, Anna thought, I seem to know these people, suddenly. Wanting only to be polite, she invited the man upstairs for a coffee on the roof. He declined, saying he was working, but, in truth, he would welcome the opportunity to come over later if he could bring his mother with him. Anna must have looked surprised; she certainly had no words.

"I am sorry," the man said. "My name is Arthur Lawrence."

"Are you the man who writes the movie summaries in the television listing of the Times?"

"Why, yes, how kind of you to know that. It's the perfect job for me. There's nothing I like better than to watch movies on television."

"But you are wonderful," Masie blurted. "Anna and Alan talk about your listings all the time, as if they were small movie reviews."

Mr. Lawrence seemed very embarrassed. Masie was immediately ashamed of herself; no proper New York sophisticate, she. He went on to say that he had to get back. His mother's nurse was in class and she was being difficult, something about Masie and the rooftop. She used to carry on, he said, about communists on the rooftop. She recognized Alan as someone she knew to be a Communist years ago. She goes back and forth in time in her mind. Once, thinking it was the 1950s, she had actually phoned the FBI to report the communists across the way. That was when he had taken the apartment downstairs and gotten a live-in nurse to look after her. She's not physically ill at all, but more than he can handle when she is riled over something. Just now, she is upset that Masie is alone on the rooftop, because of the murders.

Murders?

"Is three o'clock okay? I'll bring a jug of Mint Julep, if it's all right, and the male nurse has to come, too. So sorry about all of this."

He rushed off, but Masie stood a few moments where she was.

Murders?

Another peaceful Sunday afternoon, only this time it was Arthur Lawrence, television movie critic for The New York Times, his senile mother, and Rafe, the male nurse. Could that be his real name, Masie wondered? She had trouble looking at him, because each time she did, his eyes were on hers. Twice, she had lost control and looked into his eyes, which were almost as black as his t-shirt. She had a terrible difficulty tearing her eyes away and he didn't try, even as he carried on a conversation with Arthur about Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind.

Rafe said to Masie, "Albert thinks the only decent Beat writer is Ginsberg. The rest are self-indulgent prigs."

"I've never been to Coney Island," Masie said, thinking of Singe Le Fleur.

"We should go," Rafe answered.

Masie looked away in confusion.

Arthur said, "Why, yes, you must go. Rafe has the day off tomorrow."

Masie felt herself red as a beet and said, "The murders? What about the murders?"

"Don't think about that, Masie. Mama seems to have forgotten all about it."

His mother had fallen immediately to sleep on arrival. It seemed to be enough that she had finally reached the rooftop. Rafe suddenly gathered her things and picked her up to carry her across the street. Arthur rose, too, but Masie asked him to stay a little while. He went downstairs to open the door for Rafe, and to ask the doorman to let them in, and returned.

"It's really nothing for you to worry about," he said, as he poured the last of the Mint Julep. "The man who lived here pretended he was a photographer and lured naïve young girls into his studio in the garage downstairs."

"He killed them downstairs?" Masie was shocked and horrified.

"No, no. He convinced them to go ‘on location' into the countryside."

"How many?"

"Several, I don't know, really. I'm so sorry to have you worry. I have work to do tonight and I have to go. Will you be all right?"

"Yes," she said uncertainly.

Albert was rising to take his leave.

"Wait. The man, the killer, did he commit suicide?"

"He was found in the street when a car hit his body. He was already dead."

"Do you think it possible he could have jumped? Or could he have been pushed? Or thrown, already dead when he hit the ground?"

"I don't know any of it. I was on a trip to London when it happened. I heard about it from Rafe when I got home. My mother saw whatever happened, but we didn't tell anyone."

"But why not?"

"She couldn't have related it rationally. She forgot all about it, I thought. I wanted it to stay forgotten for her sake. She's only started up about it since you've been here."

"Rafe? Did he see?"

"Well, that's something I would like to know, too. All he's ever said to me was that it was justice, whatever happened. One of the victims was a girl he knew, very young, from his hometown in Michigan. I've often wondered…. No, Rafe wouldn't leave Mama alone, I know that."

Masie stared at him. It was as if he were talking to himself at the last. But Arthur collected himself and started for the door to the studio.

He turned and said, "Masie, Rafe is a fine young man, very talented, a film school graduate student. He's written a script about the murders. I've read it. He has a great future ahead of him. Whatever we may imagine, and imagine is all we can do, let us leave his brilliant future intact."

Masie walked him downstairs to double lock the door behind him. On the sidewalk, he turned to thank her for having them. He saw her eyes were large, more puzzled than frightened, as she inspected the street in front of her new home. She looked up at the third floor window of his mother's apartment.

"Masie," Arthur said, "whatever bad spirit or karma or energy the place ever had has been long wiped out by you and your good friends. I've watched from my window for three years since. The evil could never have survived the love and laughter. Be at peace and be happy."

He turned and crossed the street. Masie locked the door and went upstairs. She closed the studio door to the roof and locked it. She had never known that door to be locked in the year she'd been coming here. It was one of the wonders of New York, she had told Anna, that even one house had an unlocked door. Anna had responded that the good place spirit protected her house.

Masie showered and got into bed with a book, wondering if she would be able to sleep, but she did sleep. She slept a long, peaceful, restful sleep, and woke rejuvenated and feeling very much alive and well.

Masie and Rafe ate hot dogs and French fries from a stand on the Boardwalk at Coney Island and spun cotton candy for dessert. The beach was very crowded, strangely so, against the backdrop of the all but abandoned amusement park, the rusting wrought iron Parachute Jump towering in the sky, the mostly closed buildings of fun, the fading signs announcing the Fat Lady, the Tattooed Man, and the Freak Show. The disused Thunderbolt roller coaster had a huge tree growing through its tracks. Rafe told Masie it had been put up for sale by the City just last year, but there were no buyers.

But the Cyclone was still operating, all 3,000 feet of it, all of its nine hills, and its minute and a half rush at 60 MPH. She was in his arms within 30 seconds. She was almost collapsing from weakness when they got off the ride. Rafe took her arm and wrapped it around his. They strolled slowly along the Boardwalk. Uncontrollably her hand kept reaching up and stroking the hard muscles of his upper arm and down to those of his forearm. He stopped and leaned her back against the railing, one powerful arm on either side of her, his hands grasping the railing.

She looked into the deep darkness of his eyes.

She said, "Rafe?"

He said, "Don't think about it. Don't think about anything."

He kissed her and she kissed him back.