A Major Work of Fiction
(originally published in Ploughshares under the title Instead Of)

When I was sixteen years-old I fell in love with a mysterious yellow-haired girl from a prominent and affluent family. Knowing she was a year older than me and there was nothing that would remotely excite her to return my feelings, I told her that my parents were dead.

It was never easy for me to talk to girls and with a girl like Allison it was impossible. I babbled. I told stories. I felt compelled to fill all air space, afraid even one half second of silence would lose her attention. We didn’t use words like ‘aloof’ in high school or ‘patronizing’ to describe a girl who didn’t laugh at boys who made farting sounds in their armpits but observed them with the curiosity due insect specimens, wondering what it might be like to watch them suffocate in a vacuum jar.

None of my friends liked Allison. The girls were jealous of her clothes. The boys made fun of her ass. In fact she did have more of a woman’s body than a girl’s. I loved the slow easy sway of her buttocks when she walked and the extra little twitch she gave when she knew some idiot was watching. I loved the way she crossed her legs at the knee in history and dangled a shoe from one toe, just biding time, as if all of high school was a stop light you had to endure until it turned green. People repeated all kinds of rumors about Allison. That she dated older guys. That she was a lesbian. That she’d ‘done it’ with a TV star. That her mother drank. But since no one had ever hung out with Allison, or had even been to her house; since no one knew anything for sure, I imagined I recognized something of myself in this strangely grown up girl: a weariness of things adolescent, a desire to stay beneath the radar of the residing morons, and above all a longing to pass through to the other side—to college.

At the end of junior year we both had roles in The Music Man . She was a Pickalittle Lady, a small singing part. I was the oafish Mayor Shinn, the second male lead. When the curtain fell on opening night she threw her arms around me. “You were so funny!” she said, and in one spontaneous gesture I read all the encouragement I needed. Summoning the courage of positive thinking from a technique I had read about in Readers Digest called Sylva Mind Control I offered to walk her home along the beach. But most of the time she just trudged through the sand with no more than a one-word response or an indifferent shake of her head. Obviously I was blowing it.

“You like theater? I love theater. But it makes me sneeze.” I was doing it again. Launching long mindless riffs. “I bet you don’t know why? You know why?” Performing non-stop motor mouth stand-up routines, compulsively trying to entertain. “Because my grandmother took me to see Broadway matinees with her theater lady friends who were all decked out in beaver coats and feather hats and heavy perfume and as soon as I got in the car with them I started to sneeze. I mean it!” As if she cared. “To this day I sneeze whenever I see a Broadway show. You ever see a Broadway show?”

She was trying to make out the blinking lights of a fishing boat on the horizon. “My father’s office is next door to the Shubert Theater.”

“That’s where I saw A Chorus Line! You ever see A Chorus Line?”

She removed a tortoise shell beret, shook out her shoulder-length hair and twisted it into a pony tail with an elastic band. “My father is the director’s lawyer.” With her arms raised and her blouse stretched tight across her breasts I was awed by the outline of her nipples.

Allison lived in the only house in town with a swimming pool. She wore A-line skirts and cashmere sweater sets in winter, culottes when the weather warmed, and had a miniature Lhasa Apso named Cimba. (“It’s Tibetan,” she explained. “For ‘small’.) She was an only child of parents who traveled everywhere; the kind of kid whose term paper describes her spring vacation in the Fiji Islands. My family had recently moved to a four and a half room apartment across the street from the boardwalk. When the windows were open it smelled of boiled franks. I slept on a convertible couch in an alcove next to the kitchen.

“You must be very proud of your father,” I said.

“Well, of course. Aren’t you proud of yours?”

Just that morning my father and I had had at it again outside the bathroom. The bathroom was the most coveted place in the apartment. It had near-spiritual significance, a sanctum sanctorum, the only place anybody could be alone. My mother sat on the toilet seat and cried; my brother locked the door to spread out his collection of civil war memorabilia. The baby was left on the potty chair for hours with a bowl of cheerios and milk. My father went to the bathroom with a newspaper under his arm, a full pack of cigarettes and a transistor radio, like someone leaving for a day at the beach. This morning I thought I might explode if I didn’t get in there in time. I rapped on the door, “Please! Dad! There’s only one bathroom in this place,” when the toilet flushed and the door flew open. His face in shadow, his body backlit with fluorescent light, he advanced silently through a haze of cigarette smoke. Since his last business had gone under and we’d had to sell the house, I had no idea what to expect. I might get the silent treatment: the brush-by and the cold hard stare. Or he might talk about me in the third person, have a conversation with himself as if I wasn’t in the room. He rarely raised his voice. His preference was to try to extract confessions that enabled him to feel even worse about himself.

“You’re saying that I fail to provide for my family.”

“Of course not.” I tried to get around him.

But he blocked me. “Do you tell all your friends that your father is a loser?”

I faked right, deked left and slipped inside. “No.”

“Interesting,” he said through the door. “Which ones do you tell?”

“I don’t have a father,” I told Allison. She stopped cold. Her heels squeaked as she turned in the sand. She had round hazel eyes with long lashes the color of white gold and she looked straight into my eyes demanding information. “ He’s dead,” I said, and for a moment I had even shocked myself. Who even thinks a thing like that?

Allison touched her hand to my chest. I could feel my heart beating into her palm. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. Her eyes shone silver. They were filling with tears. “And,” she hesitated. “Your mom?”

Oh, what the fuck. In for a penny, in for a pound. I bowed my head. I didn’t actually say she was dead but the implication was clear enough.

We were holding each other now as the surf pounded. “You poor baby,” she said in my ear. I felt a shiver down my back and my knees nearly gave. This was an intimacy I had never known with a girl, never felt with anyone in my life. I had no desire to do harm to my mother and father. Their deaths were a kind of drama I was constructing as Allison pressed her breasts against me and allowed me to kiss the tears from her cheeks. Bits of movies I had seen, books I had read, comics, newspaper stories provided the details of what was becoming my first major work of fiction.

A sudden snow storm. The week before Christmas. Just after midnight. The roads slick with black ice. They were driving home from their tenth wedding anniversary party when their car was side swiped by a truck on the Long Island Expressway. The driver had been drinking. My brothers and I were awakened by a plain clothes detective in a heavy tweed overcoat. His breath smelled of peppermint. He gave us each a stick of gum. We were separated for months, sent to different homes, eventually taken in by my grandparents. But they were old. It was a hardship for them to raise three boys. We were finally adopted by a poor but well-meaning couple who lived in a small apartment across the street from the boardwalk and weren’t able to have children of their own.

“You never got to say good-bye to your real parents.”

“They died instantaneously.”

“It must be so hard for you.”

What was hard was living a double life. Because I could never bring Allison to my home—How could I be sure she wouldn’t call them my step parents? —I contrived to spend every minute I could at hers. This in itself necessitated a subterfuge straight out of Dickens—I believe we had read Nicholas Nickleby that semester—about some nights having only bread and butter to eat. Furthermore, I could never allow her parents to cross paths with mine or ever speak to them on the phone (I may have suggested we couldn’t afford one). While my father explained my absences according to his image of himself—“The girl’s family has money. No wonder he doesn’t want anything to do with us.”—and was resigned to losing a son, her parents were delighted to gain one.

My presence seemed a positive relief, proof that their moody, big-boned daughter was not only interested in boys but attractive to them. Although her father had a Manhattan law practice that catered to famous names in show business, he was more than generous to a lower middle class boy like me, especially an orphan boy. He liked to give me his old shirts and sweaters and teach me how to line up a putt. A tall pear-shaped man, he wore tortoise shell half-eye readers on the bridge of a long proud aquiline nose over which he appeared to view the world with an imperious bemusement. He was fond of squeezing my funny bone when he thought I was down, bellowing “Nil Illegitimus Carborundum, My boy!” and ticking off the names of famous orphans who’d become successful. It was like Allison hadn’t brought home a boyfriend but the United Way.

Her mother called me ‘the Foundling.’ A sun-wizened ex-Broadway chorus girl with a cigarette-raspy voice, she spent most of her days at the club playing golf and evenings, whenever she felt she could get away, in the city, meeting her husband for dinner at Joe Allen’s or Sardi’s, and leaving Allison to the care of Marina, their live-in housekeeper and cook.

When her father was detained at work, I was invited to stay to dinner. Her mother sat with her elbows on the dining room table, brittle forearms with sun spots to the wrist, the wings of a crisply roast duck. She barely picked at Marina’s pork dumplings and poppy seed cake, but made comments to Allison as she ate. “Perhaps we want half as much, Dear?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“I wonder if Ricky would think so?” Ricky Fox was a favorite on a weekly TV show for kids. Allison told me they had gone to summer camp together.

“I don’t really care.”

“Obviously not.”

Her mother enjoyed watching me eat, however, and chose to see my gluttony as deprivation. “Have more veal. Don’t forget the mushroom sauce. I’d like to give those miserable step-parents of yours a piece of my mind.” She was full of stories from her days on the stage, tales in which she danced in rhinestone g-strings and was chased by a certain married producer who offered her bracelets and hats for, and here she would wink, “You know what.”

“Mother, I think that’s enough.”

“The Foundling doesn’t think so, do you?”

“Don’t embarrass him.”

“At least I don’t bore him.”

“I’m going to leave the room.”

“When did you become so grumpy?”

In spite of their skirmishes I loved Allison’s mother’s stories of theatrical New York in the fifties, one big opening night party, one friendly neighborhood overflowing with the most eccentric and generous people in the world. Allison’s mother was happiest when she had an audience. “Put another shot of rye in this, would you, Dear?” Early on she had taught me to make Old Fashioneds. “And a double dash of bitters? Good boy.”

When she was bored, however, she was mean. One long rain swept afternoon when a game of hearts turned to bickering Allison ran from the table and slammed her bedroom door so hard an entire shelf of antique ceramic dolls crashed to the floor. She wept as we knelt to sweep up the mess, “I can never live up to that bitch’s expectations.”

“Of course not,” I said. “You’re only one person. Your mother needs a roomful.”

That was the first time she said, “I love you.”

If Allison felt tormented by her mother there was always the presence of Marina to make a home. A large silent Lithuanian woman who lived in the maid’s suite off the kitchen, Marina was suspicious of all male mammals that had not been gelded. She wore a head scarf tightly knotted under her chin and a crucifix the size of a Bowie knife. Marina doted on Allison, whom she had effectively raised, and looked at me like a mouse turd on a white lace table cloth. Marina stared at me while Allison and I ate tuna sandwiches on the pool patio, while we did homework together after school. If we were watching one of Allison’s father’s clients on television, Marina was crocheting on the couch; if we were in the sun room, she was washing windows. Softly spoken, demurely dressed, Allison was in all ways modest in front of Marina, doubly so before her father. Having fantasized more about sex than ever having had any, I was happy enough with our long wet good night kisses and the occasional back seat feel at the drive-in. I loved Allison and had never dreamed of being a part of a family remotely like hers.

Every weekend after Memorial Day, Allison’s parents prepared a barbecue for their closest friends, retired B movie actors and former TV variety show dancers who took the Long Island Railroad from the city, no one I had remotely heard of, but who were openly gay and played suggestive games of charades and broke into Cole Porter songs at the piano. This was the life I was supposed to have been born to, café society from TheThin Man movies; the flip repartee, the urbane drinking, the cigarettes that seemed to punctuate conversation like a conductor’s baton. Men in white linen pants who danced the mambo and bare-shouldered women who howled at their off-color jokes. I adored Allison’s parents and would never have done anything to jeopardize my place in the family when one day an odd thing happened.

Allison and I were in the pool. Her father was grilling porterhouse steaks at the far end by the diving board, her mother swilling drinks on the chaise lounge not ten feet away, telling a story about the first time she met Sinatra—when I felt a hand in my bathing suit. It was Allison’s hand and it was no shy brush with temptation, but a determined attempt to milk the cow. Through the haze of Beefeater martinis and the rising smoke from the steaks, no one noticed. Later that afternoon in the pool house I tried to run my hand under her bathing suit and got a firm No! in response. But the following Wednesday on Marina’s day off, while her mother was in the kitchen heating meat loaf, I felt Allison’s fingers tugging urgently on my zipper. As her mother finished the better half of a bottle of Beaujolais and sang along to the original cast album of South Pacific, Allison stuffed her hand inside my fly. I told her about the empty cabanas at the beach club where my friends took their dates to make out. She had no interest. I begged her to meet me under the boardwalk. She said it was too damp. She suggested we do things that I had never imagined, she knew exactly what turned her on, but it was only when her mother might catch us. I got my first blow job when her mother ran upstairs to watch The Brady Bunch. It may be that for the rest of my life I will associate cunnilingus with the sani-rinse cycle of the dishwasher because I spent many evenings on my knees between Allison’s legs as she braced herself against the kitchen sink while her mother was walking the dog.

I was terrified of being caught, of being thrown out of the perfect family, but on the last weekend in June her father asked if I’d like to be his daughter’s date to the Emmy Awards ceremony in New York City, to sit at the table with the family and all his most important clients. Her mother winked, “We’ll see Ricky.”

Some boy I used to know. A big jerk, was the way she described Ricky Fox. A freckle-faced red head with a glossy pompadour and a lean rubbery dancer’s body, he was a fixture on educational TV, a kind of PBS Mouseketeer. Nothing went on. Our parents were friends, was all she offered when I asked her about sex. I had never ‘done it’ with Allison, but I imagined Ricky Fox had. And the less she wanted to talk about him, the more I imagined.

Back at home my own mother and father were too angry with each other to talk. They would occupy the same bedroom, stare at the same black and white television set while sitting at opposite ends of the same couch; eat at the same table, take slices of pizza from the same box, and pretend the other did not exist. Important information was conveyed loudly enough to be heard but addressed solely to the children, so that if I or my middle brother were not at home my father might ignore my mother and tell the three-year-old, “I’m getting a colon biopsy tomorrow. If they find cancer in the polyps, my will is in my top drawer under the socks.” But somehow the idea of their oldest son on live national television awakened a shared sense of possibility, united them in a quest, and I became the family project.

My father volunteered to rent me a tuxedo while my mom prepared to remake me in the image of a her favorite celebrity, an actor named George Hamilton, who had hair like Zorro and skin with the buffed polish of a goat hide brief case. As I more closely resembled Izak Perlman it was to be a complicated makeover. A three-fold plan was devised. First, I needed a rich sun tan. I also had to drop ten pounds, and lastly, my mom was going to straighten my hair.

Although the Sunday of the awards ceremony was a blazing ninety-four degrees, it came after a week of sporadic rain and unyielding humidity that spun my hair into a ball of grade 4 steel wool. At sunrise I spread an old blanket on the hot tar roof of my apartment building in an attempt to coax a fast sun tan. In order to make up for lost time, my mother’s brother Rudy, or The Idiot, as my father called him, also in on the project, provided me with a secret formula that he told me life guards used, a squeezer bottle with equal parts baby oil and iodine. Like a rotisserie chicken, I turned and basted myself every half hour. I did not eat breakfast or go downstairs for lunch as I was fasting to take off extra pounds and I did not realize the effects of the secret formula until I saw my dad’s expression when he came up to the roof to get me.

“The Idiot told you to do that?” he said. My skin was scorched and raw to the touch, the approximate color of a red bliss potato. My mom led me directly to the bathroom where I sat on the toilet seat while she massaged hair straightening mixture into my scalp. Then she wrapped my head in aluminum foil and moved me to the living room to watch the ball game while my hair relaxed. Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee sportscaster, was swabbing his face with a handkerchief. The infield in the Bronx, he announced, had reached ninety-seven degrees. Allison and her mom were to pick me up in a limousine at five. It was now four-fifteen. My dad plucked lint off the tuxedo he rented. He had gotten a deal on the season’s most fashionable style because it was a winter model, made of mohair. My skin was beginning to blister. The thought of wearing it brought to mind the Iron Maiden, an implement of torture used in the Spanish Inquisition which I had read about in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not: a coffin-size black box with spikes welded inside the door, designed to puncture the private parts of the victim as it closed. My mom un-wrapped my head. “Oh, my,” she said with the expression of someone unpinning a diaper. “It must be the heat.” My hair was the texture of chocolate syrup on a scoop of strawberry ice cream.

My family accompanied me downstairs when the limousine arrived. Most of the children in the building had never seen a real chauffeur. An overly solicitous body builder in an ill-fitting double breasted suit, he held open the door and softly said many things about my comfort. It did not register at first that he was mumbling apologies, the air conditioning in the limo did not work. Allison was wearing a real ruby tiara and a shoulder-less pink satin gown that made crunching sounds as she slid over. Her mother was rattling the bottles of the limo bar and cursing the driver until he raised the divider to shut her out. I found that if I did not move, if I remained motionless and simply visualized a water moccasin sliding across my foot, that I could ignore the fact that my body was covered with second degree burns. Relief arrived with a sea breeze as we swung through empty streets and even Allison’s mother had gently succumbed to sleep. But soon we hit the Long Island Expressway, packed bumper to bumper with Sunday evening beach traffic.

Enveloped in the exhaust of many thousands of cars headed back to Manhattan, the long black limousine did not move. Allison’s mother snored. My slacks, ordered a size too small at the waist to account for the weight I was supposed to lose, girded the soft flesh of my belly like piano wire. To our right a car full of teenage thugs in bathing suits, their bare feet sticking out the back window, drank beer and smoked pot and, laughing at the limousine and the stiffs in formal dress, took turns spitting phlegm loogies at us. Closing our windows in this heat was not an option. I tried blocking them out with Sylva Mind Control. Think positively: Soon the traffic would budge. A loogie hit me in the neck. Utilize the right brain hemisphere: Before long, I will eat. I had not eaten in twenty-four hours and my stomach made those noises you hear in trucks that need a new transmission. Lurching forward a car length at a time, swinging into lanes in which the traffic abruptly stopped the moment we moved into them, we made slow progress.

The hand on my zipper came as a surprise, but Allison’s expression was familiar, the one that always said, “Now. Now that Marina is at the supermarket and my father won’t be home until eleven and my mother is singing show tunes in the shower, I want you now. Now that the chauffeur is blasting his horn at traffic and my mother is two inches away, snoring, let’s do it now,” and Allison silently parted the teeth of my zipper, found the only six inches of my body that were not sunburned and gave me a hand job as we entered the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

The Americana Hotel was a Camelot-era palace of gold brick and white marble on Seventh Avenue and 52 nd Street. The lobby was twenty-five stories high and walled with glass. A sidewalk with striped paving surrounded the semicircular rotunda. We swung into a long line of limousines disembarking their formally attired guests. Allison’s father pushed the chauffeur aside and ushered us through the revolving doors. This was my moment to shine. Born to a family of crass working people always in the midst of crisis, I was entering a world of women in rhinestone ball gowns and witty men in dinner jackets. The air conditioning churned, cold as a Moscow Palace, and Dr. Zhivago was surrounded by admirers. It was Zhivago, Omar Shariff himself, with a bushy mustache and eyes like liqueur-filled chocolates. Allison’s father was making introductions. “Omar, I’d like you to meet my wife,” he said, “and my daughter.” Omar Shariff lowered his eyelids and touched his lips to Allison’s wrist with a modest smile.

“Meet my daughter’s beau,” her father turned to Peter Ustinov and murmured sotto voce, “Both his parents were killed.”

“He’s our little foundling,” Allison’s mother tousled my hair.

The great actor patted my shoulder gravely. I took a cocktail from a waiter’s tray.

Allison took my elbow. “Are you all right?” I seemed to have stumbled. Peter caught me under the arm.

“Am I all right?” What a question. Other than getting ready to face the love of my girlfriend’s life, the boy I had to assume she really loved, I had never felt better. The waiter offered more cocktails all around. There were chefs in tall white hats carving chateau briand, serving mounds of iced jumbo shrimp with silver tongs.

“You’re drooling,” Allison said.

“I am not drooling.” I did, however, start shaking the moment I saw him, the slender young man with flame-colored hair doing an improvised tap routine on the dance floor. My skin was liquid slick. I was wet all over, but warm inside, the way you feel when you piss yourself in a wet suit. There was a gelatinous ooze on my upper lip which returned however many times I blotted it with a cocktail napkin.

Her father led the way to a wax-like figure with garishly rouged cheeks, tall and stiff as a statue yet oddly familiar. “Meet Art Linkletter,” he said. Allison curtsied before the aged television host. I shook his stone cold hand, trying to ignore the sensations erupting in my belly, which now, many years later I can attribute to an empty stomach filled with vodka and shrimp but best describe by recalling John Hurt’s first contractions in the movie Alien as the creature swims circles under his skin before exploding through his abdomen. Her father pulled me close, “Art was abandoned by his parents when he was three weeks old.” I felt his breath on my cheek, his grip on my shoulder, but above all his approval. Allison felt it, too, and beamed. I had made it. I was family. I was one of them. There would be parties like this one in Manhattan and summer weekends by the pool. I might follow in her father’s footsteps or even start a stage career. Who knew? My future was, as they say, positively rosy. But so was everything else, the light turning colors, gradually growing dim. Allison looked alarmed. “You’re completely pale.”

“Over here!” her mother called.

“Oh, it’s Ricky!” Her father waved, and led us to a cocktail table near the bar

where Ricky Fox in a tailored white dinner jacket was clinking glasses with Allison’s mother. His red pompadour was unmistakable. His skin incandescent. The leprechaun smile, the arms outstretched in greeting, seemed to say not that he was happy to meet you but happy for you to have the opportunity to meet him. This was what it meant to be a star, to radiate one’s own light, to be the absolute object of adoration.

“Pinky!” he reached for Allison.

“Hello Ricky,” she offered her cheek.

“She used to call him The Menace,” her mother said proudly. “Dennis the Menace. We all did.”

“We’re older now, Mother.”

“Oh. Older. Excuse me. All of seventeen.”

Allison was stiff. Uncomfortable. Standoffish. But not unlike the way you might treat someone you once loved, or still loved, who had never loved you back. “This is Ira,” she said, and Ricky turned to me, but only for a moment, as if one glance was enough. Enough, at least, to convince me there was still heat between them, that in fact she had loved him. Must still love him. Must have had sex with him. Must still want to have sex with him. Because he was Ricky Fox and I was, well, me.

Her father began pulling chairs from the table and I did indeed need to sit. The floorboards seemed to wobble as I walked and the band sounded softer. Voices melded and slowed as if stretching like taffy and all I saw were the million glass beads of the ballroom chandeliers, spinning above me like the massive cones of giant crystal brassieres. I remember prisms of lamplight, silver, white, then a thousand shards of color, a kaleidoscope of famous faces, as I fell to one knee and pitched forward. Allison screamed. Ricky Fox stepped away, shaking vomit from his shoe. I retched again and fell on my face.

Instead of a seat at the round table for twelve in front of the orchestra, I awoke on a king mattress with a striped duvet whose pattern matched the wall paper, in a suite on the eighteenth floor. It was in fact Ricky’s suite. “Make sure the ass hole is out of there before I get upstairs,” I heard him say as two waiters carried me to the elevator. Hugh Downs was tonight’s emcee. He was very witty. I watched it all on TV as Allison sat at the foot of the bed. There was a bottle of Pepto Bismol on the night table. And an ice bucket with a wash towel draped over the side. My shoes were off, as were my tight pants and the itchy wool jacket. I was feeling much better.

On TV the camera panned the ballroom. The orchestra cued the emcee. Allison was sitting cross-legged, her chin in her palms, the blue glare shimmering on her bare shoulders.

Hugh ad-libbed a joke. Fifty tables roared approval. I inched up to the front of the bed, next to her. At the commercial break I said “I’m sorry.” The sunburn. The drinking. The starvation diet. “I ruined everything. I lost it. I saw you and Ricky together and—“
“Me and Ricky? Ricky is my father’s partner’s son. I’ve known him since I was five years-old.”

“Do you still love him?”

“Love him? He’s a creature. He always has been. He used to torment me until I cried. He played tricks on me. In summer camp he stole my underpants…” she wasn’t laughing at the memory, she was dead serious, getting angry, balling her fists. “He put them on a baby pig. Miss Pinky, the camp mascot. We all had to come to camp with name tags sewn on every article of clothing and when the counselors took the underpants off the pig they told all the kids they were mine.”

Allison abruptly stood, grabbed the telephone receiver from the night stand and held it out for me to take. “Here. Your parents are worried about you.”

“There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Why don’t you tell them yourself. They’re waiting for your call.”

“How do you know?”

“My mother spoke to them.”

“What did she say?”

Allison straightened her gown. She took a step toward the door then turned, “She said, ‘Hello. Are you Ira’s step-parents?’” and I saw myself as I appeared in her eyes, in Marina’s eyes, the turd on a white lace table cloth.

It was over, of course. Everything. Allison. Her parents. Their parties. Their friends. I was no more than a family trivia question now, the subject of pool side reminiscence as the steaks sizzled and the drinks were poured. What was his name? Allison’s first boyfriend? The putz who said he was an orphan and passed out at the Emmy’s?

I felt her shadow hovering over me. I heard her breathing. I smelled sweat and perfume and the crisp scent of hotel sheets. I was too ashamed to speak or even raise my head. Nor did I know what else to say. But she didn’t move. It was as if she was waiting for something, as if trying to decide.

And I couldn’t help but wonder. Was it really over? Could I explain? Could I try to tell her how it was for a boy like me? Would she listen? Could she forgive me? Positive thoughts, I told myself. This is what she was trying to decide. I could fix it, make it right again and as I lifted my gaze to Allison, she held it for a moment, slowly shaking her head with a tight forbearing smile—a smile!—and caught me square in the face with the hard knuckles of her closed right hand.

#

The limousine company had sent a new car. The air conditioning worked perfectly. I sat alone in the plush back seat. The bar was stocked. Scotch. Vodka. Beer and ice cubes in a miniature refrigerator. Peanuts. Cashews. Just the sight of it made me queasy. When we pulled up to my building it was almost one in the morning. The lobby was empty. The soles of my patent leather pumps echoed all the way to the elevator.

I pressed my ear to the door of my apartment. Not a sound. I removed my shoes and turned the key, gently, gently, pushing the door to avoid the squeak. But the lights in the foyer were on, every one. And every lamp in the living room as well. My parents sat upright, legs crossed, arms folded, waiting up for my arrival so they could ignore me. “Why does he hate us so much?” my mother said to my father.

“He doesn’t hate you, he hates me,” my father said.

“But he told them we were both dead.”

“I’m the failure,” my father insisted.

“And I never account for anything?” my mother was indignant.

In a four and a half room apartment it is impossible to get away. Not when the living room is next to the kitchen, your parents are on the pull-out couch you sleep on, one brother is asleep in the boys’ bedroom, the other in my parents’ bed. The bathroom, however, at half past one in the morning, was miraculously unoccupied and sitting on the toilet seat with my father’s newspaper, turning up the volume on his transistor radio and having a smoke, I was enabled one blissful moment of solitude while holding a cold wet wash cloth to my rapidly swelling eye.