Extract from Summer Crossing by Truman Capote

On a side street off Broadway and not far from the Roxy Theatre there was an open-air parking lot.  A lonesome, wasted-looking area, it lay there the only substantial sight on a block of popcorn emporiums and turtle shops.  There was a sign at the entrance which said NEMO PARKING.  It was expensive, and altogether inconvenient, but earlier in the year, after the McNeils had closed their apartment and opened the house in Connecticut, Grady had started leaving her car there whenever she drove into town.

Sometime in April a young man had come to work at the parking lot.  His name was Clyde Manzer.

* * *

Before Grady reached the parking lot she was already looking for him: on dull mornings he occasionally wandered around in the neighborhood or sat in a local Automat drinking coffee.  But he was nowhere to be seen; nor did she find him when she reached the lot itself.  It was noon and a hot smell of gasoline came off the gravel.  Though obviously he was not there she crossed the lot calling his name impatiently; the relief of Lucy's sailing, the year or hour she had waited to see him, all the things that had buoyed her through the morning seemed at once to have fallen out from under her; she finally gave up and stood quietly despondent in the throbbing glare.  Then she remembered that sometimes he took naps in one of the cars.

Her own car, a blue Buick convertible with her initials on the Connecticut license-plate, was the last in line, and while she was still searching several cars away she realised she was going to find him there.  He was asleep in the backseat.  Although the top was lowered, she had not seen him before because he was scrunched down out of view.  The radio hummed faintly with news of the day, and there was a detective story open on his lap.  Of many magics, one is watching a beloved sleep: free of eyes and awareness, you for a sweet moment hold the heart of him; helpless, he is then all, and however irrationally, you have trusted him to be, man-pure, child-tender.  Grady leaned, looking over him, her hair falling a little in her eyes.  The young man she looked at, he was somebody of about twenty-three, was neither handsome nor homely; indeed, it would have been difficult to walk in New York and not see reminders of him every few steps, although being out in the open all day, he was very much more weathered than most.  But there was an air of well-built suppleness about him, and his hair, black with small curls, fit him like a neat cap of Persian lamb.  His nose was slightly broken, and this gave his face, which, with its rustic flush, was not without a certain quick-witted force, an exaggerated virility.  His eyelids trembled, and Grady, feeling the heart of him slip through her fingers, tensed for their opening.  "Clyde," she whispered.