Just Across the Street in New York City

Toulousa Bell dances in the subway between Queens and Manhattan on the way to her new job at the 23rd Street Triplex Cinema. That's where her colleague falls in love with an usher, an event that drags in the neighbors, including a red-headed feminist teenager, an actor in a pornographic play at the Off-Center Theater, a shriveled miserly mother, and a botanist at the American Rose Institute.

The City pulses with 20th-century love adventures between Penn Station and Central Park's Ice Rink, inside FAO Swartz and Carnegie Hall, and from the Top of the Sixes to Maryann's Mexican Restaurant. Taxi cabs, Jones Beach, and the Staten Island Ferry serve as rendezvous sites. In the city that never sleeps, even birth and death ignite surprising relationships.