"Sure, but–"

"And all I get is shit from her… Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, holy shit it's a goddamn cluster of bums. I tell you–" He stops suddenly, as if exhausted, and turning away from another advertisement for Les Misérables, remembering something important, asks, "Did you read about the host from that game show on TV? He killed two teenage boys? Depraved faggot. Droll, really droll." Price waits for a reaction. There is none. Suddenly: Upper West Side.

He tells the driver to stop on the corner of Eighty-first and Riverside since the street doesn't go the right way.

"Don't bother going arou–" Price begins.

"Maybe I go other way around," the cabdriver says.

"Do not bother." Then barely an aside, teeth gritted, unsmiling: "Fucking nitwit."

The driver brings the cab to a stop. Two cabs behind this cab both blare their horns then move on.

"Should we bring flowers?"

"Nah. Hell, you're banging her, Bateman. Why should we get Evelyn flowers? You better have change for a fifty," he warns the driver, squinting at the red numbers on the meter. "Damnit. Steroids. Sorry I'm tense."

"Thought you were off them."

"I was getting acne on my legs and arms and the UVA bath wasn't fixing it, so I started going to a tanning salon instead and got rid of it. Jesus, Bateman, you should see how ripped my stomach is. The definition. Completely buffed out…," he says in a distant, odd way, while waiting for the driver to hand him the change. "Ripped." He stiffs the driver on the tip but the driver is genuinely thankful anyway. "So long, Shlomo," Price winks.

"Damn, damn, damned," Price says as he opens the door. Coming out of the cab he eyes a beggar on the street – "Bingo: thirty" – wearing some sort of weird, tacky, filthy green jump suit, unshaven, dirty hair greased back, and jokingly Price holds the cab's door open for him. The bum, confused and mumbling, eyes locked shamefully on the pavement, holds an empty Styrofoam coffee cup out to us, clutched in a tentative hand.