Now these are the most opportune of circumstances. Daylight. Eye-contact. The wry monotone of a sane man's voice to offset the act. What I propose is something far more difficult. For I have fallen in love with an exercise girl named Holly Servant who appears every morning on television. What I propose is to woo her. To woo her from afar at first, to woo her with the words love has written upon my heart. To woo her by the pen--for e-mail is too ephemeral, too case-insensitive, to convey the substance of what I feel. Abelard to Heloise@mortalcoil.net? I think not! No, the pen it is. I will woo her by the pen . . . and thereafter bed her by the sword.

The air was khaki today on West 44th Street. Perhaps the soot on the window had prismed the remnants of sunlight, or perhaps it was the neon-skewed dusk of Times Square at an angle I had not observed before. No matter, I opened the window and breathed khaki air. It smelled of engine fluid, of engine fluid and fresh pralines. Sticky poison. But it was air, so I inhaled deep gulps of it. Four stories down, I watched a man in gray overalls as he stared under the hood of his truck. Steam rose around his head, khaki-tinted steam. He wiped his forehead with a gray rag.

There was a cluster of taxis at the intersection of Broadway and 44th. Their horns were silent. Rush hour had passed. Now was the hour of khaki air, the hour of sticky poison and silent cabs and twilight. Saxophone music came up the street; it was from the blind man who worked the southeast corner across from the praline cart. He played the same songs on the same street corner every afternoon, four o'clock to eight o'clock, rain or shine; this was his final song, "Yesterday." As the saxophone sounded, a homeless woman in a Yankees cap suddenly began to sway back and forth and sing:

There's a dog in the house.

There's a dog in the house.

There's a dog in the house.

There's a dog in the house.

There's a dog in the house.

There's a dog in the house.

As I leaned farther out the window, I felt a sudden drop of water on my head. The sky was cloudless, the khaki air darkening to black; I squinted at the last traces of sunlight across the Hudson River. Then another drop of water hit me. The drops of water took several seconds to worm their way through my hair to my scalp. Then I felt for them, the drops of water, with my fingertips. They were gritty. They had fallen from the air conditioner one floor above my window. As soon as I glanced up, another drop of water hit me in the eye.

Think me not insincere, gentlemen: I do love Holly Servant. Though I am by no means a sincere man, nevertheless, I am of a second spirit where Holly is concerned. The visible beauty of the flesh, it was once believed, testified to higher virtues of the soul. The inside was reflected on the outside since God made the world not to deceive man but to sustain him. And oh what virtues I discern in Holly Servant! Cut to close-up: there are angels aglow in her eyes, cool blue seraphim who whisk from side to side as she calls out the cadences. "C'mon," she urges, "just ten more, nine more, eight more, now seven . . . " From the bare floor of my studio apartment, I find within me the final ten. The muscles of my stomach feel like hot wires, and sweat trickles into my eyes, but still I find her ten more. As much as by her eyes, I am driven by the sing-song of her voice, the lilt even as she launches into twelve minutes of aerobics. Now, however, I only watch--for the sake of the downstairs neighbors. Yet also for my own sake, for I watch the delicate dance of her nipples, shining like tulips through her leotard. By the end of the segment, she has sweated her various definitions into the cotton. Then, at last, the cool-down. She rolls her head from side to side, strands of her pixied blond hair clinging to her moist back and shoulders. She stresses the cool-down especially. "Make sure to give yourself at least fifteen minutes for your heart rate to come down--and never exercise to the point of pain or exhaustion." Common sense, to be sure, but she takes the time to caution us, to belabor the safety factor. Because she cares. The emphasis on the word "never" is desperate--as if she would never be able to forgive herself if even one viewer overdid it. At last she signs off, and always with a piece of wisdom or a metaphor: "Life is like a card game, and The Sunrise Workout is like your ace in the hole. Play it, and rake in the chips for the rest of your life."

Dear Miss Servant,

And you are dear to me, Miss Servant. That sounds presumptuous, I am aware. Nor is it my custom to address letters to people I have not met. But I have broken with custom, perhaps with decorum, in this case--because certain instances arise in life which beg, which even demand, words. So I write to you, for I cannot speak them. Fate has determined us strangers, and I would not broach Fate beyond these several lines. Nevertheless, you have grown dear to me. Yours is the first face I see every sunrise, the first voice I hear every morning. Let me tell you about my alarm clock. It is a shrill thing, a loud electric buzz, set on a stand beside my bed. As I sleep, the clock rests less than a foot from my ear. When it goes off, it annihilates whatever dreams are left inside me--I am not awakened so much as galvanized. That was before, of course. Now I welcome the sound, welcome the annihilation of my dreams. For the sound has come to signal your dear image on my television, your kind words within my room. When you speak to me of life, I am filled with hope. For myself, of course. But also for the world. Life is good, Miss Servant. Though babies starve in the Third World, though holocaust hangs upon the air, though disease and violence race through the streets of our major metropolitan areas, despair has no place in the heart of man. Let him only look to the Sunrise for his inspiration.

Sincerely yours, etc.

I am a waiter.

That is to say, again, I wait. It began one morning at the Department of Motor Vehicles. (What better place for an autodidact?) I stood on a line that bent twice before it angled into the single arc that circumscribed of the entire second floor of the building. My nose was buried in Kafka when I happened to overhear a conversation between two suits in front of me; they were commiserating, in deep cynical voices, over the sums of money each would lose in the several hours until their turns came up. Finally, I took pity on them. I suggested, without a thought of profit, that if one of them would lend me his cellular phone, I would be glad to call them when the wait had wound down to a half hour.

They eyed me with suspicion at first. But then, perhaps sighting Kafka, shrugged at one other and handed over a shiny black telephone. When at last I summoned them, and when at last their turns came up, I received a tip of one hundred dollars. Plus, they let me keep the shiny black phone and wrote down my name in one of their shiny black binders--a gesture I have always found complimentary. Within a week I was receiving two or three requests per day. I became a familiar face not only at Motor Vehicles but also at several downtown post-offices, outside theater openings and movie premieres, at Knick and Ranger Ticketron outlets, etc. Nor was I high-faluting: I would sit in cars until alternate side of the street parking regulations went out of effect or in limousines as their drivers stepped out for fellatio. Always, of course, I scaled fees in accordance with the client's ability to pay.

No, nothing is served by such particulars, I agree. Especially since the letter to Holly Servant is posted. The sun burned against my scalp as I slid the mailbox shut. For an instant, I stared into the sun. Then I closed my eyes, and the sun was inside my head.

Holly's point, indeed, was driven home in an unanticipated way last night. As I hurried past Full Pockets, the male strip-joint down on Eighth Avenue, I was accosted by a bruiséd kid. (I prefer the poetic "bruiséd," accented in a nineteenth century tubercular manner, to "gay," which is too salubrious, or "homosexual," which is too clinical.) And he was a kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, and whether he was bruiséd by nature or by necessity I haven't a clue. But he grabbed me by the left arm and shot me a desperate bruiséd look. The only words he spoke were: "Want to party." Now the first thing I thought was how fortunate he was to have hit on me, since I wasn't going to lash out. From his looks, the same suggestion had cost him in the past. There was a blue-green half-moon, a perfect crescent, beneath his right eye, a cracked tooth in the front of his mouth, and a scar down the center of his chin. And there was a plea in his voice, in the three words he spoke, a plea too in the way he clung to my right arm . . . and I thought why not? Once he was down on his knees, who would know the difference? Lips are lips, and his would be as earnest as I could want. Yet I declined. Decorum, gentlemen! Decorum, at all cost. Then, too, there was the issue of aesthetics, the mental aftertaste. So I shook loose, wrested my left forearm from his grasp and hurried the rest of the way home.

"The world is too greasy," I said.

"Compared with what?" he said. "With another world?"

And I knew he had me: if I answered yes, he would ask me on what basis I declared the existence of another world. For by the very act of predication, by the copula I would need to invoke the existence of another world, I would render that world this world. And if I answered no, he would ask me on what basis I judged this world too greasy. The only chance I had was a finesse. So I said, "The world that is beyond thought."

Where once he had been prolific, prodigious, knocking off unpublishable novels and epic poems between columns, now his output slowed and then ground to a halt. He began to miss deadlines. The first time, the paper reprinted an old article. The second week, they withheld his check. Still, he could not write. He was blocked. He telephoned to tell me. "Why not just write?" I asked. "Whatever comes, comes."

"It's not that simple," he explained.

He was right, of course, it wasn't. He was blocked and then some. He was dammed. Not a trickle got through, not a sentence, not a word. He trembled even to sign his name. The paper canned him after he missed a sixth consecutive deadline.

Perhaps he ought to seek professional help, I suggested.

He stabbed me in the left hand with a salad fork. He stabbed me without a word, then lunged at me again, across the table at the Kosher Deli, and I took three stitches between the third and fourth knuckles. It was an awkward moment in our friendship.

Afterwards, in the emergency room, he wept, and then at last I realized he would never write another column. He used his resume of publications to secure a university line, and he has since recovered to the point that he can scrawl brief comments on the backs of his students' essays. But he no longer thinks of himself as a writer, and in fact he will not acknowledge conversational references to his work. He has renounced that part of his life, and all of his acquaintances from that period.

Except me.