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breasts. The peg slotted into one hole, then later slotted into another, and it was all supposed to matter in some way because the heads were so pretty. But they were still just pegs and holes; it was still just a game.
    "To add to the feverish gossip," the perky female narrator went on feverishly, "some sources close to the actress are saying that Juliette may be carrying Todd's child!"
    That shook me. Whatever calm my lust had given me was gone on the instant. Talk of love triangles and pregnancy and desertion brought my own situation flooding back in on me: Lauren, Carl, Serena. I seized hold of the remote. I snapped off the TV. I leaned
forward on the sofa in the gathering dark, my elbows propped on my thighs, my hands clasping and twisting against my lips. I prayed silently.
What am I going to do, Lord? What should I do now?
    Then I sat in the silent television room, staring into space.
    Then, when deep night came, I went out to look for the girl.

The Den
    The Den-the club where Lauren said Serena hung out—was in the old meatpacking district on Manhattan's Lower West Side. I was surprised to see how crowded the neighborhood was in the middle of the week like this. All the old butcher shops were dance clubs now. There were partygoers on every sidewalk, passing in the dark under the long awnings, in the lee of the grimy brick walls, or spilling over into the broad, cobbled streets. They moved in packs and pairs through the night from club to club, entryway to entry-way, cordon to cordon, line to line. The guys all looked alike to me: gawky dopes with spiky hair and untucked shirts, the long tails dangling over slacks or jeans. Each girl, on the other hand, was a sight to behold: young, some of them teens, some wearing small, sleek dresses and some in frilly taffeta, some wobbling on high heels they hadn't mastered yet, all of them poignant and pretty to my middle-aged eyes.
    I found The Den near the corner of Twelfth Avenue. The line there was maybe twenty couples long. I moved beside it to the entrance, catching the smell of perfume as I passed. The perfume smelled like candy or fruit, something little girls would wear playing dress-up. In front, the club was like the other clubs I'd seen, all but unmarked, a discreet sign on the brick wall, a cordon in front of a pair of massive doors.
    The guy guarding the approach was a masterpiece of cliché-without-irony. Muscle-bound, block-headed. Wearing a tight black
T-shirt even in the brittle autumn night. I flashed him a hundred-dollar bill and told him I was doing a review of New York clubs for a magazine in the Midwest. He muttered darkly into a walkie-talkie, then thumbed me in, playing it a little extra cool, I thought, now that he figured someone might describe him in the press.
    Inside, the place was done up to look like a cave, with lights flickering in alcoves like fire, throwing the shadows of the dancers up on the fake rock walls. The dancers packed the place; the floor was dense with them. They thrashed and coiled like snakes touched by a live wire. The girls' bare shoulders and bare legs caught the colored lights and gleamed. The boys with their untucked shirts were sunk in glimmering nothingness. All of them, judging by flashes of their sweat-shiny faces, seemed to be in a kind of narcissistic trance, eyes closed, lips parted, their attention wholly inward. The music hammered at them. It hammered at me. Ephemeral bursts of electronic Morse code in a spastic melody. A jungle sideman amped up under it with a migraine beat. And out of the midst of all that noise, a woman's voice, thin as a drifting specter and full of a specter's longing. She was singing about sex, but she made it sound like love.
    I moved along the outskirts of the dance floor, pushing through clusters of young, light, almost insubstantial flesh. The smell—I remembered that smell—not the patches of perfume and cologne here and there, but the pervasive smell beneath that: cold, processed air