New York City, September 3, 2015

★ Now the boys were feuding over the air conditioning and would keep the feud alive through the day, the skinny older one asking to have the cold shut off and the sturdy younger one climbing up on the couch to turn it back on. Again the foulness was more telling than the heat. The new exhaust from idling traffic blended with the general filth of the atmosphere. A thick canopy of trumpet vine, surging south, shaded a bench on the Broadway median. The children survived a detour to the grocery store without wilting or even whining. The late-day air was still thick, but not as saturated as real high summer — heavy, rather than sweaty. Unfamiliar kids drifted into and out of and back into the playground wiffleball session, fusing for a spell with someone else’s netless volleyball lesson in short left field. The wiffleball was one adult against two or four or three children, each baserunner circling the bases without stopping till chased all the way around to home plate. It took four cans of seltzer to rehydrate the pitcher afterward, in the darkness of late dinnertime. Out in the night, partygoers milled in the lights by the grills on the new luxury building’s roof, fading into a shapeless mass of bodies where the light gave out — more bodies, surely, than yet had moved into the stacked glass-fronted boxes below. Now and then whooping and other sounds of enjoyment carried across the avenue.