The Broken Hearts Club [antikvár]

ONEi' '." . I" ^^ rief ? I'll tell you about grief," says the man in the dark suit. "And pain so bad you tliink you will die from it, so horrible you didn't imagine it could exist. Pain that hurts without visible wound. But it lashes you to a bed, it won't let you move, it reduces your imagination to an endless series of replaying images. You've all experienced it, or you wouldn't come here to tell your stories every week."The other three men acknowledge the truth of it by nodding, silently. They're at a small round table, in the private room, in the back of Mackey's Steak & Ale Tavern on Twelfth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street in New York. The piaster is peeling and the room smells of beer. There's a plank floor, and a draft from the tar-papered window. There's a pus-green glass fixture over the 40-watt bulb on the ceiling. Steam hisses in a pipe, somewhere behind the merry British coachmen driving horses, decorating watermarked wallpaper on the wall."It's the supreme grief inflicted by one sex upon another. It's the grief of a broken heart.""Amen to that, brother.""We should be grateful that our doctor got us together, chose us for this club. Men aren't supposed to feel like us,1