The LITTLE RED-HAIRED GIRL has called me from France every other day this week. She announces her severe poverty, then says, "It costs $7-a-minute for me to call you." And when she stays on the line for 20 minutes after that, I wonder if she needs to talk to me more than she needs to eat.

Just now, she called me here at THE PAPER for the second time today. But I missed her call. When I phoned her back in France, on the company nickel, her recorded voice said, in English, "We're not home right now but..."

She hasn't told me about 'we,' and I'm not going to ask, because hearing her admit that she brought her boyfriend along might cause my own inability to eat; a tight stomach wishing it were full of French food.

When she called for the first time today, her voice shivering, "I'm alone in my apartment...it's cold," I remembered being cold with her last winter in her car, as we drove to her friend's house to buy weed. Her dealer was a dancer living with six other girls from the dance department and we arrived as they were all dressing to go out: ideal, concentrated, hurtful beauty, ballerina thighs and straight backs and bare necks and long natural hair fluttering around me in a casual rush. One of the girls stopped in front of me, and her long skirt wilted, her flat stomach level with my eyes. "You're a guy: how do I look?," she asked me.

'You're gonna torture some motherfucker tonight.' I thought. "You look great." I answered.

She fluttered away but held my eye as she yelled into the kitchen, "Your friend has good taste, LITTLE RED-HAIRED GIRL." And THE LITTLE RED-HAIRED GIRL looked up from helping her beautiful dealer break dirt weed into quarter bags on the kitchen counter and she met my eyes across the room and smiled. The bleak florescent kitchen light accented every flaw in her splotchy skin and caused me to fantasize that we were looking at each other from parallel subway cars, about to pull away, and she would be gone, this stranger I was suppose to meet, but did not.

Her beautiful pot dealer playfully chastised her. "Hey, pay attention to what we're doing here. I need to get going."

"Oh, sorry," said THE LITTLE RED-HAIRED GIRL. When she looked back down at the weed, I studied her freely, and idealism welled up in me in a powerful nausea and my breathing stuttered, careful, like a tiny gold fishhook lay in my esophagus and breathing too hard or fast might drive the gold barb into my wet inner lining. And it is your destiny to BUY THE COMMONPLACE BOOK…

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