ONE SPRING EVENING in the early ’80s, Ann Beattie handed me a flower as she walked up the stoop where I sat waiting for my friend Ned to get home.

      I knew she lived on the top floor of that West 20th Street brownstone, across from the General Theological Seminary. Ned (as I prefer to call him) told me about her moving in. He was excited—she was going to be his ticket into print! After spending years writing a perfect novel, one that would permit him to re-enter the world without shame, he was determined that her clout would get it published.

      So it’s piquant to see Beattie make use of that setting and of Ned and his dog (material I mined myself for my novel Queer’s Progress) in “Major Maybe,” the charming New Yorker story of April 20, 2015 (collected in The State We’re In: Maine Stories, from Simon & Schuster). Her narrator, who “sometimes bought a single flower to take back to the apartment,” meets a dog named Major Maybe, as well as “the guy in the basement apartment”—“a psychologist who specialized in adolescents.”

      As it happens, Ned occupied her building’s garden floor-through. He was in his late fifties, recently forced by cataracts—a big deal then—to retire from his job as copy editor at Consumer Reports. Although indeed a specialist in adolescents, Ned was not exactly a psychologist, but ran a sketchy operation (housed in an Episcopal parish house, yet) called Gay Counseling. His specialty was taking young clients—virginal coming-outers—to bed. As a subspecialty, he was willing after a free romp or two in his pullout-couch to serve as their paid therapist.

      Sex was the alpha and omega of Ned’s life, but he had a practical reason for being promiscuous: He didn’t want his lover, a bodybuilder thirty years younger and engrossed in his own affairs with men like the Marlboro Man (or the male model impersonating him) and Stephen Sondheim to perceive him as an old man nobody else wanted.

      Ned had a dog, too, a young Skye Terrier named Mackie. Alhough “Major Maybe” perhaps conflates several persons and dogs—the man who sets out chairs seems to me less likely Ned than the pornographer next door (whose apartment had its own adolescent traffic)—Mackie appears to be the model for the titular one (and I vaguely remember hearing about the incident that provides the kernel of Beattie’s story).

      In curious fact, Ned was by way of being a canine expert, having published, under the pseudonym “John Howe,” a guide called Choosing the Right Dog. On the strength of its success, he even appeared on the Today Show. He had spent his youth alternately teaching English Lit—at Columbia, Kenyon College and Lawrenceville, where he filled Thornton Wilder’s old post—and traveling the world. He lived a year at a time in such locales as Tangier and Port-au-Prince. In London he came to know Stevie Smith, V.S Pritchett and Elizabeth Bowen (he said Eddie in The Death of the Heart was the only character in all fiction in which he recognized anything of himself). To Pritchett he became practically an adopted son, until their inevitable blowup.

      Whether from the waning of youth or of parental remittances, Ned found himself living a constrained life in New York. He kept up with a few friends, including the caterer Donald Bruce White, the landscape architect Bob Zion and the poet Bruce Phemister, but lived in hiding from the rest of the world, in deliberate flight from his own and others’ expectations, until he could redeem them at a blow by publishing that perfect novel. He was on the run most of all from the dogged and unrelenting demands of his Harvard class fund for a donation. (He'd gotten into Harvard, he told me, by inadvertently signing his application letter “Love, Ned”: “Well, the only letters I’d ever written were to my mother from camp.”)

      But Ned lucked out in one crucial aspect of Manhattan living: He held a lifetime lease on his apartment, his tenure written into the brownstone’s deed by its previous owner, in token of favors done her. The new owner lived overhead and gnashed his teeth every time he looked out the windows at the wilderness Ned and Mackie made of lawn and garden, and treated them with that infinite unpleasantness that is the hallmark of the New York landlord who wishes to get rid of a tenant (Ned didn’t budge, though). Aside from a coating of dust Miss Havisham would have envied, Ned’s apartment was elegant, featuring two fireplaces, ample bookshelves and a glassy garden room, though he kept the living room—furnished with pieces from the reign of William and Mary—sealed up.

      And in that apartment four floors below Ann Beattie’s, year after year he polished to perfection his slender fiction. It wasn’t exactly bad, either—just irredeemably dull. Among its readers was his old Columbia colleague Caroline Gordon, who amused him by saying she just couldn’t pierce all its layers to get to its heart.

      When Beattie moved in, Ned decided his manuscript was, if not actually finished, ready for her to hawk to publishers. I never knew the details of his assault on her; he didn’t speak of it, and I didn’t ask. But his book never was published, and eventually she moved out. That he continued—at least until our inevitable blowup—to admire her writing seems a testament to her tact.

"Off with their heads!" said the Queen."Off with their heads!"
                                      —Alice in Wonderland

THOUGH WALL STREET crooks caused our economy to collapse four years ago, they have not been punished. No one's gone to jail. To the contrary, TARP secured their bonuses, adding them dollar for dollar to the national debt. Meanwhile the rest of us have not fared so well.

      Surely it's time—past time—for a decisive popular response. The nation would be grateful to the people of New York if they were to raise a guillotine on the porch of Federal Hall (where Wall meets Broad, across the street from the New York Stock Exchange and the old Morgan Bank), gather up crooked Wall Streeters (not omitting the lawyers who, in Dickens' words, "lie like maggots in a nut" in that neighborhood) and at long last give them their richly deserved haircuts. George Washington in bronze will preside with dignity and approval.

      After rolling down the steps, the heads should be spiked and tidily mounted along the streets of the financial district, and perhaps the Brooklyn Bridge, too. If left to naturally mummify, they could serve for decades to come both as warning and tourist attraction, even as the wealth-destroying financial sector self-deports.

INCIDENTALLY, EVER NOTICE that the shot in The Godfather establishing where the heads of the five mob families sit down to meet shows the New York Federal Reserve Bank? Perfect!