The East Village is the New York setting of George Stark’s temporary refuge and a pivotal episode in his conflict with Thad Beaumont. In a small rented efficiency, Stark experiences the consequences of Beaumont’s influence over him, writes in a notebook with a Bic pen, and begins preparing to leave the city; the neighborhood thus becomes both a hiding place and a site where their connection is made materially visible.

Stark’s temporary refuge

Stark rents a two-room efficiency just off Avenue B. The apartment is described as shabby, and its modest kitchen provides the setting for his return to awareness after Beaumont has apparently controlled him for a time. Stark is not certain what he said while under Beaumont’s influence, but he suspects he may have disclosed information. The episode establishes the East Village as a temporary base from which he can assess the danger of their connection.

The notebook and the divided will

At the kitchen table, Stark finds an open notebook and a Bic pen protruding from the back of his right hand. He understands that the writing took place while he was in a half-waking, half-dreaming state, and that Beaumont had somehow drawn him into an exchange of secrets. Stark remembers that answering Beaumont’s questions had felt comforting even as the conversation alarmed him. The pen and notebook turn that psychic struggle into a physical trace: Stark has watched himself write while trying, with difficulty, to impose his own will on the words.

Stark had deliberately bought the Bic pen and several notebooks after arriving in New York City, before renting the apartment. He considered buying Berol pencils but left them behind because he knew Beaumont’s hand had held the pencils during their earlier connection. Choosing a different writing instrument becomes Stark’s test of whether the bond could be broken. The distinction does not protect him from the episode: he still finds himself writing, and the effort to control what appears on the page remains difficult.

A place to wait, then move north

Afterward, Stark reasons that Beaumont probably does not know where he is staying, but avoids taking chances. He intends to honor the week he promised Beaumont, despite believing that Beaumont will not resume writing as Stark. For the moment, he plans to wait, then leave New York City and move north to gain a better position. His black Toronado is in storage, but he considers retrieving it; before departing, he has a purchase to make and uses cosmetics from the apartment’s bathroom cabinet. The East Village therefore marks a pause rather than a settled home: Stark uses it to recover, plan, and prepare for the next stage of the confrontation.

The author’s urban model

The East Village episode also resonates with the criminal fiction associated with Stark’s name. Thad Beaumont explains that he chose George Stark as a separate identity partly in response to Richard Stark, the pen name Donald E. Westlake used for novels about Parker, a professional thief with a single-minded pursuit of robbery. Beaumont recalls Westlake’s distinction between writing under his own name on sunny days and letting Stark take over on rainy ones, a model that suited Beaumont’s difficult period from 1973 to early 1975. He also compares Parker’s relentless, almost mechanical pursuit of money to Alexis Machine, the central character of the first and last George Stark novels.

That fictional tradition has a readership within the novel’s world: Dodie Eberhart, a committed crime-fiction fan, considers George Stark’s work the best of its kind and has followed it from Machine’s Way and Oxford Blues to Riding to Babylon. Against that background, the East Village scenes bring the author’s invented criminal persona into a recognizable urban setting. Stark’s practical preparations and use of writing materials give physical form to the book’s recurring overlap between a fictional identity and the life that identity claims for itself.