East Fifth Bliss

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Morris stares at Stefani jumping on his bed, unable to break himself from watching. She's like a movie star or a brutal car wreck or a fireworks display on a clear, dark winter's night, something he can't take his eyes from.

A tepid, damp breeze laps in the apartment's propped window. Early April, and the late afternoon's light is clear and unsettling. It cuts the island and the streets, bright, blemishing, blinding.

New York City. Manhattan. East Village. Fifth Street.

"You know," Stefani says to him, bouncing naked, "I know you." Freshly turned eighteen-years-old-a fact she doesn't tire of stating, repeatedly opening her sentences with "Now that I'm eighteen . . . "-she attends the St. Benedict's Ukrainian Catholic High School on East Seventh Street. She's only a junior, though, held back her fifth grade year.

Thirty-five years old, Morris could be her father, a thought that isn't lost on him. A thought he works to reconcile, or at least suppress. "Yeah, I feel I know you, too," he tells her, the lightness of his three afternoon beers all but over. "Like we're connected," he says, and, feeling he sounds stupid, adds, "Or something." Naked himself and slightly slouched, Morris's body is the body of a swimmer who hasn't swum in years-thin and long limbed, but no longer fit. His looks are the calm, intelligent looks of an elementary school principal on summer break and his fingers the fingers of someone who takes care of what he touches, fingers of a concert pianist or bomb defuser or a painter who executes detailed portraits on grains of rice. They are fingers that poorly serve Morris. They're too precise for him; he's clumsy, often drops things. Yet they'dheld Stefani, run over her skin, touched her.

His best friend N.J. once theorized that there are seven defining moments in a person's life. We're born with them, like a tongue or toes. "Seven, man," N.J. said, holding up an open hand and two fingers.

Morris asked him to identify the seven, to explain what they signified. "For me to tell you that, man," N.J. replied, "would be like explaining a poem by playing the bagpipes. It doesn't work."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Morris asked.

"It means what it means, man." N.J. was fabricating his theory on the spot, Morris was certain. It was something N.J. did, fabricate.

Morris asked, "So what happens after I experience all seven?"

"You won't make the seven, man," N.J. informed him. "Only people like Jesus Christ or Evel Knievel make it to seven. Only people filled with wonder, man."

Initially, Morris felt he'd burnt through two moments this afternoon with Stefani. Now, he can't claim certainty.