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This won’t take long. It’s a short story— with a happy ending. Trust me. You’ll like it, though the middle is a muddle, but, y’know, “in the muddle is the sounddance,” and thereafter you’re in the “unbewised.” The beginning? Ah, the beginning! Well, the beginning is, as always, the “woid,” and the woid was:

Lucky hesitated to say exactly where he was and what he did, which, just between you and me and the Staten Island Ferry: riding in a taxi along Morningside Drive on an early Sunday morning after a debauched black night. He said instead, proclaimed really,—

At one point he was laughing loudly but didn’t know what he was laughing at, but he did know why he called the cabbie’s attention to the park.

“Look!,” Lucky said, “Morningside Park is melting in the dark!”

“Right, right,” the cabbie said, adding a jocular, “Who do yuh wanna be, mac, or what?”

“Be?”

“F. Scott or Holly G?”

“To be or—to be? That is the question.”

Then Lucky said, with weary eyes under an askew grey fedora’s low profile pinch front crown, “You, sir, are a man of experience, a man of letters with an instinct about life.”

The sky was mauve and rosy, and Lucky began to bawl, so the cabbie said, “F. Scott, definitely F. Scott.”

“Why not Holly Go-go—?” Toy protested through tears.

“Lightly,” the cabbie broke in. Then, “I doan see no engraved ring in your lap, mac.”

“But no worries,” Lucky got out.

“Yeah, why is dat?”

“Cuz I know the ’motional relationship ’tween object and subject.”

“Do yuh?”

“I do,” Lucky said. Then, with nerves twitching and straining, “’S a self-creation.”

“Dat so?,” said the cabbie. Then, with a hint of a sneer playing across the corners of a loose-lipped mouth in the rear view mirror, “Den why all de cryin’?”

“Ah, yes, the tears,” Lucky got out, sniffling, “I, too, have often wondered, Why ‘all the sweet green icing flowing down’?” . . .

— “I have made a great discovery!,” and flung his hat onto the nesting table next to the rattan chair next to the citrus calamondin, whose white petals filled the air with the fragrance of orange blossoms. Then Lucky poured across the room and, turning his shock head aside with a violent cough, made a hankie turn red. And Toy thought: Yet another great discovery.

Toy was at the time sitting on the tessellated floor of her Village apartment, long bony arms round knees, back slumped against a curving, shopworn velvet sofa. So posed, chin dropped on long hand, Toy also thought,—

Oh, Lucky’s discoveries?

Well, the Rosetta Stone for one. Lucky discovered that in their backyard when they were kids—a stone with scratches that Lucky likened to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

That, by the way, was the site of Lucky’s earliest discoveries— the backyard of their suburban home in Livingston, New Jersey, where their grandparents moved to from Newark after the 60’s riots, where their parents moved to from Berlin after the streets got littered with glass, where—well, the story stops there, like a mid-twentieth century excavation. . . .

Then there was the apple that happened to fall one October mid-morning from the backyard tree that Lucky and Toy happened to be sitting beneath. It led to Lucky’s discovery of gravity. . . .

But where were we? Oh yes, with Toy thinking.

—Danse macabre. Then—

Why? Or why she thought that? Toy didn’t know. She just lit up another Hestia, another exotic brand she’d recently took up, and further thought, I will say, “Have you?” or “Tell me about it.” Or both.

Being older, by twenty seconds or so, or so the story goes, Toy was always correcting Lucky—expected to really, to, y know, help him understand.

“So?,” Ima or Aba, one or the other, would ask Toy, and then, after still another discouraging report, “Oy vey!,” one or the other would say.

When pressed with the facts Lucky’s last redoubt was always a stubborn, “I thought as much!” As with fire.

Toy wasn’t present for that discovery, however. One day Lucky just handed her a couple of charred sticks and said, “Fire.” “Oh,” she said, how lucky you are,” and he said with a short ironic look, “Don’t toy with me.” Then she said something about homo erectus, and he said, predictably, “I thought as much!”

It was then that the twins realized, unspoken, barely conceived, but instantaneously realized as with all great discoveries: They were alone together, forever, as “Lucky” and “Toy.”

Toy still has them, stone, apple, and wood . . . and virtually all versions of “Alone Together.”

—deep-frozen.

Then, hugging her knees, shivering to syncopated rhythms, sophisticated tones and tensions, Like Lucky’s apple, —Ziploced on ice, unpeeled, unsliced. . . .

“Ah, Baker!” Lucky said, and Toy thought: He looks something like a tipsy Dreiser character.

Theodore she meant. Lucky, y’see, had that “hard, smooth, evenly chiseled face, ornamented by a short, black mustache and fine, black, clearly penciled eyebrows” of a Dreiser character—only tipsy. True, to Toy Lucky didn’t look exceedingly forceful or well-formed, what with those gray eyes of his filled with a pale distress and puffy rings and lids, but still, for all his wan and pollarded look, to Toy a Dreiser character, nonetheless.

“Cool jazz,” Lucky said, and with that Toy tossed whatever her tall ice-filled glass held into the citrus’s container. That’s how she “watered” the tree. And it seemed to work. Coffee, tea (both black), wine (although it seemed to prefer martinis)—whatever she fed it, the tree responded with beautiful white flowers and oranges thereafter. You could say the tree obeyed California’s bloom season, even though it was plopped down in Manhattan.

Motioning toward her Hestia, Lucky coughed, “Can I have one of those?”

“You sure?” Toy said. Then, handing him one, “Sounds like you have—”

“Thanks,” Lucky broke in, and, setting his teeth over the unlighted cigarette, muttered, “Trying to quit.”

“Hmm,” Toy said in a hollow tone, “quitting.” Then, to Lucky’s look of puzzled wonder, “Lot of that going around.”

Lucky and Toy then exchanged impressions of Chet Baker’s “Alone Together,” as if a ritualized prayer or affirmation of avoidance.

“Expressive.”

“Melodic.”

“Capricious.”

Like that, till from Lucky, “But—”

“‘But’?,” Toy shattered the antiphony.

“Konitz, Getz?”

“Hmm,” Toy said, as if she didn’t know it was because they were Jewish.

“Better for Shiva, no?”

“Shiva?” Toy said with a loose laugh, then briskly, “Aninut, onen, aninut,” and paused before exhaling into the filaments of blue smoke that hung suspended about her beehive head, she said, “or have you forgotten?”

Lucky looked at her hard, and, cupping a big hand on a hip, raised a critical cigarette and, with narrowing eyes, said, “Funeral first, then Shiva,” then, like a challenge, “Howzat, sis?,” and stifled a cough.

Both were right. The grave was not yet closed. In fact, there might not even be a grave. They first had to decide: burial or cremation?

What did they want—Ima and Aba?

Well, to that I must now allow an unhappy fact that, frankly, I was trying to avoid. . . . Disconnection. . . . But hold on, hold on! Don’t leave. I know-I know, I said this is a happy story, and I mean it. Trust me. That said, face it: If you want to play the game, you must endure the pain. You must sample and savor the zeitgeist du jour. . . . Disconnection. . . .

Lucky and Toy, in a word, didn’t know their parents from, pardon the expression, a hole in the ground.

Disconnection. I know, I know. O tempora! O mores. I agree—the times, the customs—the boiling pot of “tzimmes,” as Ima or Aba, one or the other, would call it. But here’s the thing. It’s not only that Lucky and Toy didn’t know Ima and Aba well enough to know what they would want. They didn’t know that they didn’t know . . . till the night before, when having to speak for Ima and Aba struck them dumb. That’s when Lucky, in storm and fret, bolted, and hailed a pickup cab, and Toy curled up against the shopworn velvet sofa.

Sobering somewhat to reality Lucky asked, “What were they doing up on—where was it?”

“What difference does it make?” came from an impatient Toy. Then, after a deep becalming drag, “Broadway and something or other,” she exhaled, of where Ima and Aba were struck dead—hit and run.

Lucky hunched up and muttered, “Broadway and something or other.” Then, some pauses later, Lucky’s eyes reshaped the question he’d just asked: “What were they doing up there?”

Toy sighed and wagged her head. Then, in a voice just above a whisper, “Dying.”

Lucky nodded dumbly and stared down at Toy when she then added, “Like Hemingway’s frozen leopard.”

“Hem’s— what?”

“Africa’s tallest mountain?,” Toy said, then low and sharp, “The leopard carcass?”

Lucky gave a bland nod.

“What was it doing up there—at that altitude?,” Toy continued, as if to herself. Then with a dismissive hand flutter, “Oh, forget it. It’s just a story.”

Toy lit a new Hestia with the old one before squashing the dead cigarette in a round, clear ashtray, then said airily, “Did you know that Broadway and something or other is the most dangerous street in the city?”

Toy learned that the day before from some official or other, whose curious backward jerk of the head indicated, presumably, “Broadway and something or other.”

Because she was a painter—well, used to be until AI slapped down her artistic answer to what she called “the eroticism of greed.” One day she just conceded, Anything I can do, AI can do better, and draped her easel with a pale of purple plush, lit up and, with a thin laugh, thought, Annie Get Your Gun.

Though bereft of the courage to create, Toy, nonetheless, wondered how this official or other could so agilely do that —jerk such a heavy carnivorous head the way he did. She imagined how she would paint it—and that spatulate thumb he jerked up and over a broad, stout shoulder at the blaring red NO SMOKING sign, all the while casting a small sidelong fisheye at the Hestia she held with arching fingers not far from her boyish shag. Then, after a moment or two, this same official or other, as if hearing Saroyan, realized, It is the time of my life, and, be damned! if I’ll add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but smile instead, to its infinite glory and mystery, said, “Oh fuck it!” Then, as if enduring the terror of what he just said, but not thinking about it, “A person loses their parents, they’re—what? entitled.” Then with a frenzy rolling, “I mean,” he went on with shaking voice, “if a person can’t have a smoke under such circumstances, what’s the world coming to?” Then, after a pause, a forceful, “You know what I mean.” Toy did. Then from him, another insurgent, “Fuck it!” and an appended, “Enjoy,” and Toy, realizing rebellion was the only authentic thing left to him, sucked her cigarette, then offered him one and got a, “Hmph!” with the solemn and sad headshake of someone trying to quit, before, “Oh what the hell,” and then through closed lips, “Thanks,” and on an equable exhale, a gloomy, “Sorry for your loss, miss.”