She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she reached puberty.

More from Nine Stories

• I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone…which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.
• Life is a gift horse in my opinion.
• And I don't just mention it, for God's sake, to show you I was once an Emotional Young Person Just Like Yourself.
• Certain things should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.
• She looked nice, smoking. She inhaled and all, but she didn't wolf the smoke down, the way most women around her age do. She had a lot of charm. She had quite a lot of sex appeal, too, if you really want to know.
• The handpiece lay detached from its catch, waiting for Franny. It looked almost as dependent as a human being for some acknowledgment of its existence.