It’s Catching

My friend Patsy was telling me a story. “So I’m at the movie theater,” she said, “and I’ve got my coat all neatly laid out against the back of my seat, when this guy comes along —” And here I stopped her, because I’ve always wondered about this coat business. When I’m in a theater, I either fold mine in my lap or throw it over my armrest, but Patsy always spreads hers out, acting as if the seat back were cold, and she couldn’t possibly enjoy herself while it was suffering.

“Why do you do that?” I asked, and she looked at me, saying, “Germs, silly. Think of all the people who have rested their heads there. Doesn’t it just give you the creeps?” I admitted that it had never occurred to me.

“Well, you’d never lie on a hotel bedspread, would you?” she asked, and again: Why not? I might not put it in my mouth, but to lie back and make a few phone calls — I do it all the time.

“But you wash the phone first, right?”

“Umm. No.”

“Well, that is just . . . dangerous,” she said.

In a similar vein, I was at the grocery store with my sister Lisa and I noticed her pushing the cart with her forearms.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “you don’t ever want to touch the handle of a grocery cart with your bare hands. These things are crawling with germs.”

Is it just Americans, or does everyone think this way? In Paris once, I went to my neighborhood supermarket and saw a man shopping with his cockatiel, which was the size of a teenage eagle and stood perched on the handle of his cart.

I told this to Lisa, and she said, “See! There’s no telling what foot diseases that bird might have.” She had a point, but it’s not like everyone takes a cockatiel to the grocery store. A lifetime of shopping, and this was the first exotic bird I’d ever seen browsing the meat counter.

The only preventive thing I do is wash clothes after buying them in a thrift shop — this after catching crabs from a pair of used pants. I was in my midtwenties at the time and probably would have itched myself all the way to the bone had a friend not taken me to a drugstore, where I got a bottle of something called Quell. After applying it, I raked through my pubic hair with a special nit comb, and what I came away with was a real eye-opener: these little monsters who’d been feasting for weeks on my flesh. I guess they’re what Patsy imagines when she looks at a theater seat, what Lisa sees lurking on the handle of a grocery cart.

They’re minor, though, compared with what Hugh had. He was eight years old and living in the Congo when he noticed a red spot on his leg. Nothing huge — a mosquito bite, he figured. The following day, the spot became more painful, and the day after that he looked down and saw a worm poking out.

A few weeks later, the same thing happened to Maw Hamrick, which is what I call Hugh’s mother, Joan. Her worm was a bit shorter than her son’s, not that the size really matters. If I was a child and saw something creeping out of a hole in my mother’s leg, I would march to the nearest orphanage and put myself up for adoption. I would burn all pictures of her, destroy anything she had ever given me, and start all over because that is simply disgusting. A dad can be crawling with parasites and somehow it’s OK, but on a mom, or any woman, really, it’s unforgivable.

“Well, that’s sort of chauvinistic of you, don’t you think?” Maw Hamrick said. She’d come to Paris for Christmas, as had Lisa and her husband, Bob. The gifts had been opened, and she was collecting the used wrapping paper and ironing it flat with her hands. “It was just a guinea worm. People got them all the time.” She looked toward the kitchen, where Hugh was doing something to a goose. “Honey, where do you want me to put this paper?”

“Burn it,” Hugh said.

“Oh, but it’s so pretty. Are you sure you won’t want to use it again?”

“Burn it,” Hugh repeated.

“What’s this about a worm?” Lisa asked. She was lying on the sofa with a blanket over her, still groggy from her nap.

“Joan here had a worm living inside her leg,” I said, and Maw Hamrick threw a sheet of wrapping paper into the fire, saying, “Oh, I wouldn’t call that living.”

“But it was inside of you?” Lisa said, and I could see her wheels turning: Have I ever used the toilet after this woman? Have I ever touched her coffee cup, or eaten off her plate? How soon can I get tested? Are the hospitals open on Christmas Day, or will I have to wait until tomorrow?

“It was a long time ago,” Joan said.

“Like, how long?” Lisa asked.

“I don’t know — 1968, maybe.”

My sister nodded, the way someone does when she’s doing math in her head. “Right,” she said, and I regretted having brought it up. She was no longer looking at Maw Hamrick but through her, seeing what an X-ray machine might: the stark puzzle of bones and, teeming within it, the thousands of worms who did not leave home in 1968. I used to see the same thing, but after fifteen years or so, I got over it, and now I just see Maw Hamrick. Maw Hamrick ironing, Maw Hamrick doing the dishes, Maw Hamrick taking out the trash. She wants to be a good houseguest and is always looking for something to do.

“Can I maybe . . . ?” she asks, and before she’s finished I answer yes, by all means.

“Did you tell my mother to crawl on her hands and knees across the living room floor?” Hugh asks, and I say, “Well, no, not exactly. I just suggested that if she was going to dust the baseboards, that would be the best way to do it.”

When Maw Hamrick’s around, I don’t lift a finger. All my chores go automatically to her, and I just sit in a rocker, raising my feet every now and then so she can pass the vacuum. It’s incredibly relaxing, but it doesn’t make me look very good, especially if she’s doing something strenuous, carrying furniture to the basement, for instance, which again, was completely her idea. I just mentioned in passing that we rarely used the dresser, and that one of these days someone should take it downstairs. I didn’t mean her, exactly, though at age seventy-six she’s a lot stronger than Hugh gives her credit for. Coming from Kentucky, she’s used to a hard day’s work. Choppin’, totin’, all those activities with a dropped g: the way I figure it, these things are in her genes.

It’s only a problem when other people are around, and they see this slight, white-haired woman with sweat running down her forehead. Lisa and Bob, for instance, who were staying in Patsy’s empty apartment. Every night they’d come over for dinner, and Maw Hamrick would hang up their coats before ironing the napkins and setting the table. Then she’d serve drinks and head into the kitchen to help Hugh.

“You really lucked out,” Lisa said, sighing, as Joan rushed to empty my ashtray. Her mother-in-law had recently moved into an assisted living development, the sort of place that’s renounced the word “seniors” and refers to the residents as “graying tigers.” “I love Bob’s mom to death, but Hugh’s —my God! And to think that she was eaten by worms.”

“Well, they didn’t technically eat her,” I said.

“Then what were they living on? Are you telling me they brought their own food?”

I guessed that she was right, but what do guinea worms eat? Certainly not fat, or they’d never have gone to Joan, who weighs ninety pounds, tops, and can still fit into her prom gown. Not muscle, or she’d never be able to take over my chores. Do they drink blood? Drill holes in bone and sop up the marrow? I meant to ask, but when Maw Hamrick returned to the living room the topic immediately turned to cholesterol, Lisa saying, “I don’t mean to pry, Joan, but what is your level?”

It was one of those conversations I was destined to be left out of. Not only have I never been tested, I’m not sure what cholesterol actually is. I hear the word and imagine a pale gravy, made by hand, with lumps in it.

“Have you tried fish oil?” Lisa asked. “That brought Bob’s level from three-eighty to two-twenty. Before that, he was on Lipitor.” My sister knows the name and corresponding medication for every disease known to man, an impressive feat given that she’s completely self-taught. Congenital ichthyosis, myositis ossificans, spondylolisthesis, calling for Celebrex, Flexeril, oxycodone hydrochloride. I joked that she’d never bought a magazine in her life, that she reads them for free in doctors’ waiting rooms, and she asked what my cholesterol level was. “You better see a doctor, mister, because you’re not as young as you think you are. And while you’re there, you might want to have those moles looked at.”

It’s nothing I wanted to think about, especially on Christmas, with a fire in the fireplace, the apartment smelling of goose. “Let’s talk about accidents instead,” I said. “Heard of any good ones?”

“Well, it’s not exactly an accident,” Lisa said, “but did you know that every year five thousand children are startled to death?” It was a difficult concept to grasp, so she threw off her blanket and acted it out. “Say a little girl is running down the hall, playing with her parents, and the dad pops up from behind a corner, saying ‘Boo!’ or ‘Gotcha!’ or whatever. Well, it turns out that that child can actually collapse and die.”

“I don’t like that one bit,” Maw Hamrick said.

“Well, no, neither do I,” Lisa said. “I’m just saying that it happens at least five thousand times a year.”

“In America or the world over?” Maw Hamrick asked, and my sister called to her husband in the other room. “Bob, are five thousand children a year startled to death in the United States or in the entire world put together?” He didn’t answer, so Lisa decided it was just the United States. “And those are just the reported cases,” she said. “A lot of parents probably don’t want to own up to it, so their kids’ deaths are attributed to something else.”

“Those poor children,” Maw Hamrick said.

“And the parents!” Lisa added. “Can you imagine?”

Both groups are tragic, but I was wondering about the surviving children, or, even worse, the replacements, raised in an atmosphere of preventive sobriety.

“All right, now, Caitlin Two, when we get home a great many people are going to jump out from behind the furniture and yell ‘Happy Birthday!’ I’m telling you now because I don’t want you to get too worked up about it.”

No surprises, no practical jokes, nothing unexpected, but a parent can’t control everything, and there’s still the outside world to contend with, a world of backfiring cars and their human equivalents.

Maybe one day you’ll look down and see a worm, waving its sad, penile head from a hatch it has bored in your leg. If that won’t stop your heart, I don’t know what will, but Hugh and his mother seem to have survived. Thrived, even. The Hamricks are made of stronger stuff than I am. That’s why I let them cook the goose, move the furniture, launder the hideous creatures from my secondhand clothing. If anything were to startle them to death, it would be my offer to pitch in, and so I settle back on the sofa with my sister and wave my coffee cup in the air, signaling for another refill.

Keeping Up

My street in Paris is named for a surgeon who taught at the nearby medical school and discovered an abnormal skin condition, a contracture that causes the fingers to bend inward, eventually turning the hand into a full-time fist. It’s short, this street, no more or less attractive than anything else in the area, yet vacationing Americans are drawn here, compelled for some reason to stand beneath my office window and scream at one another.

For some, the arguments are about language. A wife had made certain claims regarding her abilities. “I’ve been listening to tapes,” she said, or, perhaps, “All those romance languages are pretty much alike, so what with my Spanish we should be fine.” But then people use slang, or ask unexpected questions, and things begin to fall apart. “You’re the one who claimed to speak French.” I hear this all the time, and look out my window to see a couple standing toe to toe on the sidewalk.

“Yeah,” the woman will say. “At least I try.”

“Well try harder, damn it. Nobody knows what the hell you’re saying.”

Geographical arguments are the second most common. People notice that they’ve been on my street before, maybe half an hour ago, when they only thought they were tired and hungry and needed to find a bathroom.

“For God’s sake, Phillip, would it kill you to just ask somebody?”

I lie on my couch, thinking, Why don’t you ask? How come Phillip has to do it? But these things are often more complicated than they seem. Maybe Phillip was here twenty years ago and has been claiming to know his way around. Maybe he’s one of those who refuse to hand over the map, or refuse to pull it out, lest he look like a tourist.

The desire to pass is loaded territory and can lead to the ugliest sort of argument there is. “You want to be French, Mary Frances, that’s your problem, but instead you’re just another American.” I went to the window for that one and saw a marriage disintegrate before my eyes. Poor Mary Frances in her beige beret. Back at the hotel it had probably seemed like a good idea, but now it was ruined and ridiculous, a cheap felt pancake sliding off the back of her head. She’d done the little scarf thing, too, not caring that it was summer. It could have been worse, I thought. She could have been wearing one of those striped boater’s shirts, but, as it was, it was pretty bad, a costume, really.

Some vacationers raise the roof — they don’t care who hears them — but Mary Frances spoke in a whisper. This, too, was seen as pretension and made her husband even angrier. “Americans,” he repeated. “We don’t live in France, we live in Virginia. Vienna, Virginia. Got it?”

I looked at this guy and knew for certain that if we’d met at a party he’d claim to live in Washington, D.C. Ask for a street address, and he’d look away, mumbling, “Well, just outside D.C.”

When fighting at home, an injured party can retreat to a separate part of the house, or step into the backyard to shoot at cans, but outside my window the options are limited to crying, sulking, or storming back to the hotel. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I hear. “Can we please just try to have a good time?” This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.

Most of Hugh’s and my travel arguments have to do with pace. I’m a fast walker, but he has longer legs and likes to maintain a good twenty-foot lead. To the casual observer, he would appear to be running from me, darting around corners, intentionally trying to lose himself. When asked about my latest vacation, the answer is always the same. In Bangkok, in Ljubljana, in Budapest and Bonn: What did I see? Hugh’s back, just briefly, as he disappeared into a crowd. I’m convinced that before we go anywhere he calls the board of tourism and asks what style and color of coat is the most popular among the locals. If they say, for example, a navy windbreaker, he’ll go with that. It’s uncanny the way he blends in. When we’re in an Asian city, I swear he actually makes himself shorter. I don’t know how, but he does. There’s a store in London that sells travel guides alongside novels that take place in this or that given country. The idea is that you’ll read the guide for facts and read the novel for atmosphere — a nice thought, but the only book I’ll ever need is Where’s Waldo? All my energy goes into keeping track of Hugh, and as a result I don’t get to enjoy anything.

The last time this happened we were in Australia, where I’d gone to attend a conference. Hugh had all the free time in the world, but mine was limited to four hours on a Saturday morning. There’s a lot to do in Sydney, but first on my list was a visit to the Taronga Zoo, where I hoped to see a dingo. I never saw that Meryl Streep movie, and as a result the creature was a complete mystery to me. Were someone to say, “I left my window open and a dingo flew in,” I would have believed it, and if he said, “Dingoes! Our pond is completely overrun with them,” I would have believed that as well. Two-legged, four-legged, finned, or feathered: I simply had no idea, which was exciting, actually, a rarity in the age of twenty-four-hour nature channels. Hugh offered to draw me a picture, but, having come this far, I wanted to extend my ignorance just a little bit longer, to stand before the cage or tank and see this thing for myself. It would be a glorious occasion, and I didn’t want to spoil it at the eleventh hour. I also didn’t want to go alone, and this was where our problem started.

Hugh had spent most of his week swimming and had dark circles beneath his eyes, twin impressions left by his goggles. When in the ocean, he goes out for hours, passing the lifeguard buoys and moving into international waters. It looks as though he’s trying to swim home, which is embarrassing when you’re the one left on shore with your hosts. “He honestly does like it here,” I say. “Really.”

Had it been raining, he might have willingly joined me, but, as it was, Hugh had no interest in dingoes. It took a solid hour of whining to change his mind, but even then his heart wasn’t in it. Anyone could see that. We took a ferry to the zoo, and while on board he stared longingly at the water and made little paddling motions with his hands. Every second wound him tighter, and when we landed I literally had to run to keep up with him. The koala bears were just a blur, as were the visitors who stood before them, posing for photos. “Can’t we just . . . ,” I wheezed, but Hugh was rounding the emus and couldn’t hear me.

He has the most extraordinary sense of direction I’ve ever seen in a mammal. Even in Venice, where the streets were seemingly designed by ants, he left the train station, looked once at a map, and led us straight to our hotel. An hour after checking in he was giving directions to strangers, and by the time we left he was suggesting shortcuts to gondoliers. Maybe he smelled the dingoes. Maybe he’d seen their pen from the window of the plane, but, whatever his secret, he ran right to them. I caught up a minute later and bent from the waist to catch my breath. Then I covered my face, stood upright, and slowly parted my fingers, seeing first a fence and then, behind it, a shallow moat filled with water. I saw some trees — and a tail — and then I couldn’t stand it anymore and dropped my hands.

“Why, they look just like dogs,” I said. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

Nobody answered, and I turned to find myself standing beside an embarrassed Japanese woman. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were the person I brought halfway around the world. First-class.”

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at. A gorilla pleasures himself while eating a head of iceberg lettuce, and it’s much more entertaining than the forty-something-year-old man who dashes around talking to himself. For me, that talk is always the same, a rehearsal of my farewell speech: “. . . because this time, buddy, it’s over. I mean it.” I imagine myself packing a suitcase, throwing stuff in without bothering to fold it. “If you find yourself missing me, you might want to get a dog, an old, fat one that can run to catch up and make that distant panting sound you’ve grown so accustomed to. Me, though, I’m finished.”

I will walk out the door and never look back, never return his calls, never even open his letters. The pots and pans, all the things that we acquired together, he can have them, that’s how unfeeling I will be. “Clean start,” that’s my motto, so what do I need with a shoe box full of photographs, or the tan-colored belt he gave me for my thirty-third birthday, back when we first met and he did not yet understand that a belt is something you get from your aunt, and not your boyfriend, I don’t care who made it. After that, though, he got pretty good in the gift-giving department: a lifelike mechanical hog covered in real pigskin, a professional microscope offered at the height of my arachnology phase, and, best of all, a seventeenth-century painting of a Dutch peasant changing a dirty diaper. Those things I would keep — and why not? I’d also take the desk he gave me, and the fireplace mantel, and, just on principle, the drafting table, which he clearly bought for himself and tried to pass off as a Christmas present.

Now it seemed that I would be leaving in a van rather than on foot, but, still, I was going to do it, so help me. I pictured myself pulling away from the front of our building, and then I remembered that I don’t drive. Hugh would have to do it for me, and well he should after everything he’d put me through. Another problem was where this van might go. An apartment, obviously, but how would I get it? It’s all I can do to open my mouth at the post office, so how am I going to talk to a real estate agent? The language aspect has nothing to do with it, as I’m no more likely to house-hunt in New York than I am in Paris. When discussing sums over sixty dollars, I tend to sweat. Not just on my forehead, but all over. Five minutes at the bank, and my shirt is transparent. Ten minutes, and I’m stuck to my seat. I lost twelve pounds getting the last apartment, and all I had to do was sign my name. Hugh handled the rest of it.

On the bright side, I have money, though I’m not exactly sure how to get my hands on it. Bank statements arrive regularly, but I don’t open anything that’s not personally addressed or doesn’t look like a free sample. Hugh takes care of all that, opening the icky mail and actually reading it. He knows when our insurance payments are due, when it’s time to renew our visas, when the warranty on the washer is about to expire. “I don’t think we need to extend this,” he’ll say, knowing that if the machine stops working he’ll fix it himself, the way he fixes everything. But not me. If I lived alone and something broke, I’d just work around it: use a paint bucket instead of a toilet, buy an ice chest and turn the dead refrigerator into an armoire. Call a repairman? Never. Do it myself? That’ll be the day.

I’ve been around for nearly half a century, yet still I’m afraid of everything and everyone. A child sits beside me on a plane and I make conversation, thinking how stupid I must sound. The downstairs neighbors invite me to a party and, after claiming that I have a previous engagement, I spend the entire evening confined to my bed, afraid to walk around because they might hear my footsteps. I do not know how to turn up the heat, send an e-mail, call the answering machine for my messages, or do anything even remotely creative with a chicken. Hugh takes care of all that, and when he’s out of town I eat like a wild animal, the meat still pink, with hair or feathers clinging to it. So is it any wonder that he runs from me? No matter how angry I get, it always comes down to this: I’m going to leave and then what? Move in with my dad? Thirty minutes of pure rage, and when I finally spot him I realize that I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in my life.

“There you are,” I say. And when he asks where I have been, I answer honestly and tell him I was lost.

The Understudy

In the spring of 1967, my mother and father went out of town for the weekend and left my four sisters and me in the company of a woman named Mrs. Byrd, who was old and black and worked as a maid for one of our neighbors. She arrived at our house on a Friday afternoon, and, after carrying her suitcase to my parents’ bedroom, I gave her a little tour, the way I imagined they did in hotels. “This is your TV, this is your private sundeck, and over here you’ve got a bathroom — just yours and nobody else’s.”

Mrs. Byrd put her hand to her cheek. “Somebody pinch me. I’m about to fall out.”

She cooed again when I opened a dresser drawer and explained that when it came to coats and so forth we favored a little room called a closet. “There are two of them against the wall there, and you can use the one on the right.”

It was, I thought, a dream for her: your telephone, your massive bed, your glass-doored shower stall. All you had to do was leave it a little cleaner than you found it.

A few months later, my parents went away again and left us with Mrs. Robbins, who was also black, and who, like Mrs. Byrd, allowed me to see myself as a miracle worker. Night fell, and I pictured her kneeling on the carpet, her forehead grazing my parents’ gold bedspread. “Thank you, Jesus, for these wonderful white people and all that they have given me this fine weekend.”

With a regular teenage babysitter, you horsed around, jumped her on her way out of the bathroom, that sort of thing, but with Mrs. Robbins and Mrs. Byrd we were respectful and well behaved, not like ourselves at all. This made our parents’ getaway weekend a getaway for us as well — for what was a vacation but a chance to be someone different?

In early September of that same year, my parents joined my aunt Joyce and uncle Dick for a week in the Virgin Islands. Neither Mrs. Byrd nor Mrs. Robbins was available to stay with us, and so my mother found someone named Mrs. Peacock. Exactly where she found her would be speculated on for the remainder of our childhoods.

“Has Mom ever been to a women’s prison?” my sister Amy would ask.

“Try a man’s prison,” Gretchen would say, as she was never convinced that Mrs. Peacock was a legitimate female. The “Mrs.” part was a lie anyway, that much we knew.

“She just says she was married so people will believe in her!!!!” This was one of the insights we recorded in a notebook while she was staying with us. There were pages of them, all written in a desperate scrawl, with lots of exclamation points and underlined words. It was the sort of writing you might do when a ship was going down, the sort that would give your surviving loved ones an actual chill. “If only we’d known,” they’d moan. “Oh, for the love of God, if only we had known.”

But what was there to know, really? Some fifteen-year-old offers to watch your kids for the night and, sure, you ask her parents about her, you nose around. But with a grown woman you didn’t demand a reference, especially if the woman was white.

Our mother could never remember where she had found Mrs. Peacock. “A newspaper ad,” she’d say, or, “I don’t know, maybe she sat for someone at the club.”

But who at the club would have hired such a creature? In order to become a member you had to meet certain requirements, one of them being that you did not know people like Mrs. Peacock. You did not go to places where she ate or worshipped, and you certainly didn’t give her the run of your home.

I smelled trouble the moment her car pulled up, a piece of junk driven by a guy with no shirt on. He looked just old enough to start shaving, and remained seated as the figure beside him pushed open the door and eased her way out. This was Mrs. Peacock, and the first thing I noticed was her hair, which was the color of margarine and fell in waves to the middle of her back. It was the sort of hair you might find on a mermaid, completely wrong for a sixty-year-old woman who was not just heavy but fat, and moved as if each step might be her last.

“Mom!” I called, and, as my mother stepped out of the house, the man with no shirt backed out of the driveway and peeled off down the street.

“Was that your husband?” my mother asked, and Mrs. Peacock looked at the spot where the car had been.

“Naw,” she said. “That’s just Keith.”

Not “my nephew Keith” or “Keith, who works at the filling station and is wanted in five states,” but “just Keith,” as if we had read a book about her life and were expected to remember all the characters.

She’d do this a lot over the coming week, and I would grow to hate her for it. Someone would phone the house, and after hanging up she’d say, “So much for Eugene” or “I told Vicky not to call me here no more.”

“Who’s Eugene?” we’d ask. “What did Vicky do that was so bad?” And she’d tell us to mind our own business.

She had this attitude, not that she was better than us but that she was as good as us — and that simply was not true. Look at her suitcase, tied shut with rope! Listen to her mumble, not a clear sentence to be had. A polite person would express admiration when given a tour of the house, but aside from a few questions regarding the stovetop Mrs. Peacock said very little and merely shrugged when shown the master bathroom, which had the word “master” in it and was supposed to make you feel powerful and lucky to be alive. I’ve seen better, her look seemed to say, but I didn’t for one moment believe it.

The first two times my parents left for vacation, my sisters and I escorted them to the door and said that we would miss them terribly. It was just an act, designed to make us look sensitive and English, but on this occasion we meant it. “Oh, stop being such babies,” our mother said. “It’s only a week.” Then she gave Mrs. Peacock the look meaning “Kids. What are you going to do?”

There was a corresponding look that translated to “You tell me,” but Mrs. Peacock didn’t need it, for she knew exactly what she was going to do: enslave us. There was no other word for it. An hour after my parents left, she was lying facedown on their bed, dressed in nothing but her slip. Like her skin, it was the color of Vaseline, an uncolor really, which looked even worse with yellow hair. Add to this her great bare legs, which were dimpled at the inner knee and streaked throughout with angry purple veins.

My sisters and I attempted diplomacy. “Isn’t there, perhaps, some work to be done?”

“You there, the one with the glasses.” Mrs. Peacock pointed at my sister Gretchen. “Your mama mentioned they’s some sodie pops in the kitchen. Go fetch me one, why don’t you.”

“Do you mean Coke?” Gretchen asked.

“That’ll do,” Mrs. Peacock said. “And put it in a mug with ice in it.”

While Gretchen got the Coke, I was instructed to close the drapes. It was, to me, an idea that bordered on insanity, and I tried my best to talk her out of it. “The private deck is your room’s best feature,” I said. “Do you really want to block it out while the sun’s still shining?”

She did. Then she wanted her suitcase. My sister Amy put it on the bed, and we watched as Mrs. Peacock untied the rope and reached inside, removing a plastic hand attached to a foot-long wand. The business end was no bigger than a monkey’s paw, the fingers bent slightly inward, as if they had been frozen in the act of begging. It was a nasty little thing, the nails slick with grease, and over the coming week we were to see a lot of it. To this day, should any of our boyfriends demand a back-scratch, my sisters and I recoil. “Brush yourself against a brick wall,” we say. “Hire a nurse, but don’t look at me. I’ve done my time.”

No one spoke of carpal tunnel syndrome in the late 1960s, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. There just wasn’t a name for it. Again and again we ran the paw over Mrs. Peacock’s back, the fingers leaving white trails and sometimes welts. “Ease up,” she’d say, the straps of her slip lowered to her forearms, the side of her face mashed flat against the gold bedspread. “I ain’t made of stone, you know.”

That much was clear. Stone didn’t sweat. Stone didn’t stink or break out in a rash, and it certainly didn’t sprout little black hairs between its shoulder blades. We drew this last one to Mrs. Peacock’s attention, and she responded, saying, “Y’all’s got the same damn thing, only they ain’t poked out yet.”

That one was written down verbatim and read aloud during the daily crisis meetings my sisters and I had taken to holding in the woods behind our house. “Y’all’s got the same damn thing, only they ain’t poked out yet.” It sounded chilling when said in her voice, and even worse when recited normally, without the mumble and the country accent.

“Can’t speak English,” I wrote in the complaint book. “Can’t go two minutes without using the word ‘damn.’ Can’t cook worth a damn hoot.”

The last part was not quite true, but it wouldn’t have hurt her to expand her repertoire. Sloppy joe, sloppy joe, sloppy joe, held over our heads as if it were steak. Nobody ate unless they earned it, which meant fetching her drinks, brushing her hair, driving the monkey paw into her shoulders until she moaned. Mealtime came and went — her too full of Coke and potato chips to notice until one of us dared to mention it. “If y’all was hungry, why didn’t you say nothing? I’m not a mind reader, you know. Not a psychic or some damn thing.”

Then she’d slam around the kitchen, her upper arms jiggling as she threw the pan on the burner, pitched in some ground beef, shook ketchup into it.

My sisters and I sat at the table, but Mrs. Peacock ate standing, like a cow, we thought, a cow with a telephone: “You tell Curtis for me that if he don’t run Tanya to R.C.’s hearing, he’ll have to answer to both me and Gene Junior, and that’s no lie.”

Her phone calls reminded her that she was away from the action. Events were coming to a head: the drama with Ray, the business between Kim and Lucille, and here she was, stuck in the middle of nowhere. That’s how she saw our house: the end of the earth. In a few years’ time, I’d be the first to agree with her, but when I was eleven, and you could still smell the fresh pine joists from behind the Sheetrocked walls, I thought there was no finer place to be.

“I’d like to see where she lives,” I said to my sister Lisa.

And then, as punishment, we did see.

This occurred on day five, and was Amy’s fault — at least according to Mrs. Peacock. Any sane adult, anyone with children, might have taken the blame upon herself. Oh, well, she would have thought. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Seven-year-old girl, her arm worn to rubber after hours of back-scratching, carries the monkey paw into the master bathroom, where it drops from her hand and falls to the tile floor. The fingers shatter clean off, leaving nothing — a jagged little fist at the end of a stick.

“Now you done it,” Mrs. Peacock said. All of us to bed without supper. And the next morning Keith pulled up, still with no shirt on. He honked in the driveway, and she shouted at him through the closed door to hold his damn horses.

“I don’t think he can hear you,” Gretchen said, and Mrs. Peacock told her she’d had all the lip she was going to take. She’d had all the lip she was going to take from any of us, and so we were quiet as we piled into the car, Keith telling a convoluted story about him and someone named Sherwood as he sped beyond the Raleigh we knew and into a neighborhood of barking dogs and gravel driveways. The houses looked like something a child might draw, a row of shaky squares with triangles on top. Add a door, add two windows. Think of putting a tree in the front yard, and then decide against it because branches aren’t worth the trouble.

Mrs. Peacock’s place was divided in half, her in the back, and someone named Leslie living in the front. A man named Leslie, who wore fatigues and stood by the mailbox play-wrestling with a Doberman pinscher as we drove up. I thought he would scowl at the sight of Mrs. Peacock, but instead he smiled and waved, and she waved in return. Five children wedged into the backseat, children just dying to report that they’d been abducted, but Leslie didn’t seem to notice us any more than Keith had.

When the car stopped, Mrs. Peacock turned around in the front seat and announced that she had some work that needed doing.

“Go ahead,” we told her. “We’ll wait here.”

“Like fun you will,” she said.

We started outdoors, picking up turds deposited by the Doberman, whose name turned out to be Rascal. The front yard was mined with them, but the back, which Mrs. Peacock tended, was surprisingly normal, better than normal, really. There was a small lawn and, along its border, a narrow bed of low-lying flowers — pansies, I think. There were more flowers on the patio outside her door, most of them in plastic pots and kept company by little ceramic creatures: a squirrel with its tail broken off, a smiling toad.

I’d thought of Mrs. Peacock as a person for whom the word “cute” did not register, and so it was startling to enter her half of the house and find it filled with dolls. There must have been a hundred of them, all squeezed into a single room. There were dolls sitting on the television, dolls standing with their feet glued to the top of the electric fan, and tons more crowded onto floor-to-ceiling shelves. Strange to me was that she hadn’t segregated them according to size or quality. Here was a fashion model in a stylish dress, dwarfed by a cheap bawling baby or a little girl who’d apparently come too close to the hot plate, her hair singed off, her face disfigured into a frown.

“First rule is that nobody touches nothing,” Mrs. Peacock said. “Not nobody and not for no reason.”

She obviously thought that her home was something special, a children’s paradise, a land of enchantment, but to me it was just overcrowded.

“And dark,” my sisters would later add. “And hot and smelly.”

Mrs. Peacock had a Dixie cup dispenser mounted to the wall above her dresser. She kept her bedroom slippers beside the bathroom door, and inside each one was a little troll doll, its hair blown back as if by a fierce wind. “See,” she told us. “It’s like they’s riding in boats!”

“Right,” we said. “That’s really something.”

She then pointed out a miniature kitchen set displayed on one of the lower shelves. “The refrigerator broke, so I made me another one out of a matchbox. Get up close, and y’all can look at it.”

“You made this?” we said, though of course it was obvious. The strike pad gave it away.

Mrs. Peacock was clearly trying to be a good hostess, but I wished she would stop. My opinion of her had already been formed, was written on paper, even, and factoring in her small kindnesses would only muddy the report. Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein’s monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn’t look at him the same way again. My sisters and I didn’t want to understand Mrs. Peacock. We just wanted to hate her, and so we were relieved when she reached into her closet and withdrew another back-scratcher, the good one, apparently. It was no larger than the earlier model, but the hand was slimmer and more clearly defined, that of a lady rather than a monkey. The moment she had it, the hostess act melted away. Off came the man’s shirt she’d worn over her slip, and she took up her position on the bed, surrounded by the baby dolls she referred to as “doll babies.” Gretchen was given the first shift, and the rest of us were sent outside to pull weeds in the blistering sun.

“Thank God,” I said to Lisa. “I was worried for a minute there that we’d have to feel sorry for her.”

As children we suspected that Mrs. Peacock was crazy, a catchall term we used for anyone who did not recognize our charms. As adults, though, we narrow it down and wonder if she wasn’t clinically depressed. The drastic mood swings, the hours of sleep, a gloom so heavy she was unable to get dressed or wash herself — thus the slip, thus the hair that grew greasier and greasier as the week progressed and left a permanent stain on our parents’ gold bedspread.

“I wonder if she’d been institutionalized,” Lisa will say. “Maybe she had shock treatments, which is what they did back then, the poor thing.”

We’d like to have been that compassionate as children, but we already had our list, and it was unthinkable to disregard it on account of a lousy matchbox. Our parents returned from their vacation, and before they even stepped out of the car we were upon them, a mob, all of us talking at the same time. “She made us go to her shack and pick up turds.” “She sent us to bed one night without supper.” “She said the master bathroom was ugly, and that you were stupid to have air-conditioning.”

“All right,” our mother said. “Jesus, calm down.”

“She made us scratch her back until our arms almost fell off.” “She cooked sloppy joe every night, and when we ran out of buns she told us to eat it on crackers.”

We were still at it when Mrs. Peacock stepped from the breakfast nook and out into the carport. She was dressed, for once, and even had shoes on, but it was too late to play normal. In the presence of my mother, who was tanned and pretty, she looked all the more unhealthy, sinister almost, her mouth twisted into a freaky smile.

“She spent the whole week in bed and didn’t do laundry until last night.”

I guess I expected a violent showdown. How else to explain my disappointment when, instead of slapping Mrs. Peacock across the face, my mother looked her in the eye, and said, “Oh, come on. I don’t believe that for a minute.” It was the phrase she used when she believed every word of it but was too tired to care.

“But she abducted us.”

“Well, good for her.” Our mother led Mrs. Peacock into the house and left my sisters and me standing in the carport. “Aren’t they just horrible?” she said. “Honest to God, I don’t know how you put up with them for an entire week.”

“You don’t know how she put up with us?”

Slam! went the door, right in our faces, and then our mom sat her guest down in the breakfast nook and offered her a drink.

Framed through the window, they looked like figures on a stage, two characters who seem like opposites and then discover they have a lot in common: a similarly hard upbringing, a fondness for the jugged Burgundies of California, and a mutual disregard for the rowdy matinee audience, pitching their catcalls from beyond the parted curtain.

This Old House

When it came to decorating her home, my mother was nothing if not practical. She learned early on that children will destroy whatever you put in front of them, so for most of my youth our furniture was chosen for its durability rather than for its beauty. The one exception was the dining room set my parents bought shortly after they were married. Should a guest eye the buffet for longer than a second, my mother would jump in to prompt a compliment. “You like it?” she’d ask. “It’s from Scandinavia!” This, we learned, was the name of a region, a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.

The buffet, like the table, was an exercise in elegant simplicity. The set was made of teak and had been finished with tung oil. This brought out the character of the wood, allowing it, at certain times of day, to practically glow. Nothing was more beautiful than our dining room, especially after my father covered the walls with cork. It wasn’t the kind you use on bulletin boards, but something coarse and dark, the color of damp pine mulch. Light the candles beneath the chafing dish, lay the table with the charcoal textured dinnerware we hardly ever used, and you had yourself a real picture.

This dining room, I liked to think, was what my family was all about. Throughout my childhood it brought me great pleasure, but then I turned sixteen and decided that I didn’t like it anymore. What changed my mind was a television show, a weekly drama about a close-knit family in Depression-era Virginia. This family didn’t have a blender or a country club membership, but they did have one another — that and a really great house, an old one, built in the twenties or something. All of their bedrooms had slanted clapboard walls and oil lamps that bathed everything in fragile golden light. I wouldn’t have used the word “romantic,” but that’s how I thought of it.

“You think those prewar years were cozy?” my father once asked. “Try getting up at five a.m. to sell newspapers on the snow-covered streets. That’s what I did, and it stunk to high heaven.”

“Well,” I told him, “I’m just sorry that you weren’t able to appreciate it.”

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn’t live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at. And the history! Wasn’t it crushing to live in a house no older than our cat?

“No,” my father said. “Not at all.”

My mother felt the same: “Boxed in by neighbors, having to walk through my parents’ bedroom in order to reach the kitchen. If you think that was fun, you never saw your grandfather with his teeth out.”

They were more than willing to leave their pasts behind them and reacted strongly when my sister Gretchen and I began dragging it home. “The Andrews Sisters?” My father groaned. “What the hell do you want to listen to them for?”

When I started buying clothes from Goodwill, he really went off, and for good reason, probably. The suspenders and knickers were bad enough, but when I added a top hat, he planted himself in the doorway and physically prevented me from leaving the house. “It doesn’t make sense,” I remember him saying. “That hat with those pants, worn with the damn platform shoes . . .” His speech temporarily left him, and he found himself waving his hands, no doubt wishing that they held magic wands. “You’re just . . . a mess is what you are.”

The way I saw it, the problem wasn’t my outfit, but my context. Sure I looked out of place beside a Scandinavian buffet, but put me in the proper environment, and I’d undoubtedly fit right in.

“The environment you’re looking for is called a psychiatric hospital,” my father said. “Now give me the damn hat before I burn it off.”

I longed for a home where history was respected, and four years later I finally found one. This was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I’d gone there to visit an old friend from high school, and because I was between jobs and had no real obligations I decided to stay for a while, and maybe look for some dishwashing work. The restaurant that hired me was a local institution, all dark wood and windowpanes the size of playing cards. The food was OK, but what the place was really known for was the classical music that the owner, a man named Byron, pumped into the dining room. Anyone else might have thrown in a compilation tape, but he took his responsibilities very seriously and planned each meal as if it were an evening at Tanglewood. I hoped that dishwashing might lead to a job in the dining room, busing tables and eventually waiting on them, but I kept these aspirations to myself. Dressed as I was, in jodhpurs and a smoking jacket, I should have been grateful that I was hired at all.

After getting my first paycheck, I scouted out a place to live. My two requirements were that it be cheap and close to where I worked, and on both counts I succeeded. I couldn’t have dreamt that it would also be old and untouched, an actual boardinghouse. The owner was adjusting her Room for Rent sign as I passed, and our eyes locked in an expression that said, Hark, stranger, you are one of me! Both of us looked like figures from a scratchy newsreel, me the unemployed factory worker in tortoiseshell safety glasses and a tweed overcoat two sizes too large, and she, the feisty widow lady, taking in boarders in order to make ends meet. “Excuse me,” I called, “but is that hat from the forties?”

The woman put her hands to her head and adjusted what looked like a fistful of cherries spilling from a velveteen saucer. “Why, yes it is,” she said. “How canny of you to notice.” I’ll say her name was Rosemary Dowd, and as she introduced herself I tried to guess her age. What foxed me was her makeup, which was on the heavy side and involved a great deal of peach-colored powder. From a distance, her hair looked white, but now I could see that it was streaked with yellow, almost randomly, like snow that had been peed on. If she seemed somewhat mannish, it was the fault of her clothing rather than her features. Both her jacket and her blouse were kitted out with shoulder pads, and when worn together she could barely fit through the door. This might be a problem for others, but Rosemary didn’t get out much. And why would she want to?

I hadn’t even crossed the threshold when I agreed to take the room. What sold me was the look of the place. Some might have found it shabby — “a dump,” my father would eventually call it — but, unless you ate them, a few thousand paint chips never hurt anyone. The same could be said for the groaning front porch and the occasional missing shingle. It was easy to imagine that the house, set as it was on the lip of a university parking lot, had dropped from the sky, like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, but with a second story. Then there was the inside, which was even better. The front door opened onto a living room, or, as Rosemary called it, the “parlor.” The word was old-fashioned but fitting. Velvet curtains framed the windows. The walls were papered in a faint, floral pattern, and doilies were everywhere, laid flat on tabletops and sagging like cobwebs from the backs of overstuffed chairs. My eyes moved from one thing to another, and, like my mother with her dining room set, Rosemary took note of where they landed. “I see you like my davenport,” she said, and “You don’t find lamps like that anymore. It’s a genuine Stephanie.”

It came as no surprise that she bought and sold antiques, or “dabbled” in them, as she said. Every available surface was crowded with objects: green glass candy dishes, framed photographs of movie stars, cigarette boxes with monogrammed lids. An umbrella leaned against an open steamer trunk, and, when I observed that its handle was Bakelite, my new landlady unpinned her saucer of cherries and predicted that the two of us were going to get along famously.

And for many months, we did. Rosemary lived on the ground floor, in a set of closed-off rooms she referred to as her “chambers.” The door that led to them opened onto the parlor, and when I stood outside I could sometimes hear her television. This seemed to me a kind of betrayal, like putting a pool table inside the Great Pyramid, but she assured me that the set was an old one — “My ‘Model Tee Vee,’” she called it.

My room was upstairs, and in a letter home I described it as “hunky-dory.” How else to capture my peeling, buckled wallpaper and the way that it brought everything together. The bed, the desk, the brass-plated floor lamp: it was all there waiting for me, and though certain pieces had seen better days — the guest chair, for instance, was missing its seat — at least everything was uniformly old. From my window I could see the parking lot, and beyond that the busy road leading to the restaurant. It pleased Rosemary that I worked in such a venerable place. “It suits you,” she said. “And don’t feel bad about washing dishes. I think even Gable did it for a while.”

“Did he?”

I felt so clever, catching all her references. The other boarder didn’t even know who Charlie Chan was, and the guy was half Korean! I’d see him in the hall from time to time — a chemistry major, I think he was. There was a third room as well, but because of some water damage Rosemary was having a hard time renting it. “Not that I care so much,” she told me. “In my business, it’s more about quality than quantity.”

I moved in at the beginning of January, and through-out that winter my life felt like a beautiful dream. I’d come home at the end of the day and Rosemary would be sitting in the parlor, both of us fully costumed. “Aha!” she’d say. “Just the young man I was looking for.” Then she’d pull out some new treasure she’d bought at an estate sale and explain what made it so valuable. “On most of the later Fire King loaf pans, the trademark helmet is etched rather than embossed.”

The idea was that we were different, not like the rest of America, with its Fuzzbusters and shopping malls and rotating showerheads. “If it’s not new and shiny, they don’t want anything to do with it,” Rosemary would complain. “Give them the Liberty Bell, and they’d bitch about the crack. That’s how folks are nowadays. I’ve seen it.”

There was a radio station in Raleigh that broadcast old programs, and sometimes at night, when the reception was good, we’d sit on the davenport and listen to Jack Benny or Fibber McGee and Molly. Rosemary might mend a worn WAC uniform with her old-timey sewing kit, while I’d stare into the fireplace and wish that it still worked. Maybe we’d leaf through some old Look magazines. Maybe the wind would rattle the windows, and we’d draw a quilt over our laps and savor the heady scent of mothballs.

I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis. One afternoon in early April, I returned from work to find a lost-looking, white-haired woman sitting in the parlor. Her fingers were stiff and gnarled, so rather than shake hands I offered a little salute. “Sister Sykes” was how she introduced herself. I thought that was maybe what they called her in church, but then Rosemary walked out of her chambers and told me through gritted teeth that this was a professional name.

“Mother here was a psychic,” she explained. “Had herself a tarot deck and a crystal ball and told people whatever stupid malarkey they wanted to hear.”

“That I did.” Sister Sykes chuckled.

You’d think that someone who occasionally wore a turban herself would like having a psychic as a mom, but Rosemary was over it. “If she’d forecast thirty years ago that I’d wind up having to take care of her, I would have put my head in the oven and killed myself,” she told me.

When June rolled around, the chemistry student graduated, and his room was rented to a young man named Chaz, who worked on a road construction crew. “You know those guys that hold the flags?” he said. “Well, that’s me. That’s what I do.”

His face, like his name, was chiseled and memorable and, after deciding that he was too handsome, I began to examine him for flaws. The split lower lip only added to his appeal, so I moved on to his hair, which had clearly been blow-dried, and to the strand of turquoise pebbles visible through his unbuttoned shirt.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, and before I had a chance to blush he started telling me about his ex-girlfriend. They’d lived together for six months, in a little apartment behind Fowlers grocery store, but then she cheated on him with someone named Robby, an asshole who went to UNC and majored in fucking up other people’s lives. “You’re not one of those college snobs, are you?” he asked.

I probably should have said “No” rather than “Not presently.”

“What did you study?” he asked. “Bank robbing?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your clothes,” he said. “You and that lady downstairs look like those people from Bonnie and Clyde, not the stars, but the other ones. The ones who fuck everything up.”

“Yes, well, we’re individuals.”

“Individual freaks,” he said, and then he laughed, suggesting that there were no hard feelings. “Anyway, I don’t have time to stand around and jaw. A friend and me are hitting the bars.”

He’d do this every time: start a conversation and end it abruptly, as if it had been me who was running his mouth. Before Chaz moved in, the upstairs was fairly quiet. Now I heard the sound of his radio through the wall, a rock station that made it all the harder to pretend I was living in gentler times. When he was bored, he’d knock on my door and demand that I give him a cigarette. Then he’d stand there and smoke it, complaining that my room was too clean, my sketches were too sketchy, my old-fashioned bathrobe was too old-fashioned. “Well, enough of this,” he’d say. “I have my own life to lead.” Three or four times a night this would happen.

As Chaz changed life on the second floor, Sister Sykes changed it on the first. I went to check my mail one morning and found Rosemary dressed just like anyone else her age: no hat or costume jewelry, just a pair of slacks and a ho-hum blouse with unpadded shoulders. She wasn’t wearing makeup either and had neglected to curl her hair. “What can I tell you?” she said. “That kind of dazzle takes time, and I just don’t seem to have any lately.” The parlor, which had always been just so, had gone downhill as well. Now there were cans of iced tea mix sitting on the Victrola, and boxed pots and pans parked in the corner where the credenza used to be. There was no more listening to Jack Benny because that was Sister Sykes’s bath time. “The queen bee,” Rosemary called her.

Later that summer, just after the Fourth of July, I came downstairs and found a pair of scuffed white suitcases beside the front door. I hoped that someone was on his way out — Chaz, specifically — but it appeared that the luggage was coming rather than going. “Meet my daughter,” Rosemary said, this with the same grudging tone she’d used to introduce her mother. The young woman — I’ll call her Ava — took a rope of hair from the side of her head and stuck it in her mouth. She was a skinny thing and very pale, dressed in jeans and a Western-style shirt. “In her own little world,” Sister Sykes observed.

Rosemary would tell me later that her daughter had just been released from a mental institution, and though I tried to act surprised I don’t think I was very convincing. It was like she was on acid almost, the way she’d sit and examine something long after it lost its mystery: an ashtray, a dried-up moth, Chaz’s blow-dryer in the upstairs bathroom. Everything got equal attention, including my room. There were no lockable doors on the second floor. The keys had been lost years earlier, so Ava just wandered in whenever she felt like it. I’d come home after a full day of work — my clothes smelling of wet garbage, my shoes squishy with dishwater — and find her sitting on my bed or standing like a zombie behind my door.

“You scared me,” I’d say, and she’d stare into my face until I turned away.

The situation at Rosemary’s sank to a new low when Chaz lost his job. “I was overqualified,” he told me, but, as the days passed, his story became more elaborate, and he felt an ever-increasing urge to share it with me. He started knocking more often, not caring that it was 6:00 a.m. or well after midnight. “And another thing . . . ,” he’d say, stringing together ten separate conversations. He got into a fight that left him with a black eye. He threw his radio out the window and then scattered the broken pieces throughout the parking lot.

Late one evening he came to my door, and when I opened it he grabbed me around the waist and lifted me off the floor. This might sound innocent, but his was not a celebratory gesture. We hadn’t won a game or been granted a stay of execution, and carefree people don’t call you a “hand puppet of the Dark Lord” when they pick you up without your consent. I knew then that there was something seriously wrong with the guy, but I couldn’t put a name to it. I guess I thought that Chaz was too good-looking to be crazy.

When he started slipping notes under my door, I decided it was time to update my thinking. “Now I’m going to die and come back on the same day,” one of them read. It wasn’t just the messages, but the writing itself that spooked me, the letters all jittery and butting up against one another. Some of his notes included diagrams, and flames rendered in red ink. When he started leaving them for Rosemary, she called him down to the parlor and told him he had to leave. For a minute or two, he seemed to take it well, but then he thought better of it and threatened to return as a vapor.

“Did he say ‘viper’?” Sister Sykes asked.

Chaz’s parents came a week later and asked if any of us had seen him. “He’s schizophrenic, you see, and sometimes he goes off his medication.”

I’d thought that Rosemary would be sympathetic, but she was sick to death of mental illness, just as she was sick of old people, and of having to take in boarders to make ends meet. “If he was screwy, you should have told me before he moved in,” she said to Chaz’s father. “I can’t have people like that running through my house. What with these antiques, it’s just not safe.” The man’s eyes wandered around the parlor, and through them I saw what he did: a dirty room full of junk. It had never been anything more than that, but for some reason — the heat, maybe, or the couple’s heavy, almost contagious sense of despair — every gouge and smudge jumped violently into focus. More depressing still was the thought that I belonged here, that I fit in.

For years the university had been trying to buy Rosemary’s property. Representatives would come to the door, and her accounts of these meetings seemed torn from a late-night movie. “So I said to him, ‘But don’t you see? This isn’t just a house. It’s my home, sir. My home.’”

They didn’t want the building, of course, but the land. With every passing semester, it became more valuable, and she was smart to hold out for as long as she did. I don’t know what the final offer was, but Rosemary accepted it. She signed the papers with a vintage fountain pen and was still holding it when she came to give me the news. This was in August, and I was lying on my floor, making a sweat angel. A part of me was sad that the house was being sold, but another, bigger part — the part that loved air-conditioning — was more than ready to move on. It was pretty clear that as far as the restaurant was concerned, I was never going to advance beyond dishwashing. Then, too, it was hard to live in a college town and not go to college. The students I saw out my window were a constant reminder that I was just spinning my wheels, and I was beginning to imagine how I would feel in another ten years, when they started looking like kids to me.

A few days before I left, Ava and I sat together on the front porch. It had just begun to rain when she turned, and asked, “Did I ever tell you about my daddy?”

This was more than I’d ever heard her say, and before continuing she took off her shoes and socks and set them on the floor beside her. Then she drew a hank of hair into her mouth and told me that her father had died of a heart attack. “Said he didn’t feel well, and an hour later he just plunked over.”

I asked a few follow-up questions and learned that he had died on November 19, 1963. Three days after that, the funeral was held, and while riding from the church to the cemetery Ava looked out the window and noticed that everyone she passed was crying. “Old people, college students, even the colored men at the gas station — the soul brothers, or whatever we’re supposed to call them now.”

It was such an outmoded term, I just had to use it myself. “How did the soul brothers know your father?”

“That’s just it,” she said. “No one told us until after the burial that Kennedy had been shot. It happened when we were in the church, so that’s what everyone was so upset about. The president, not my father.”

She then put her socks back on and walked into the parlor, leaving both me and her shoes behind.

When I’d tell people about this later, they’d say, “Oh, come on,” because it was all too much, really. An arthritic psychic, a ramshackle house, and either two or four crazy people, depending on your tolerance for hats. Harder to swallow is that each of us was such a cliché. It was as if you’d taken a Carson McCullers novel, mixed it with a Tennessee Williams play, and dumped all the sets and characters into a single box. I didn’t add that Sister Sykes used to own a squirrel monkey, as it only amounted to overkill. Even the outside world seems suspect here: the leafy college town, the restaurant with its classical music.

I never presumed that Kennedy’s death was responsible for Ava’s breakdown. Plenty of people endure startling coincidences with no lasting aftereffects, so I imagine her troubles started years earlier. As for Chaz, I later learned that it was fairly common for schizophrenics to go off their medication. I’d think it strange that the boardinghouse attracted both him and me, but that’s what cheap places do — draw in people with no money. An apartment of my own was unthinkable at that time of my life, and even if I’d found an affordable one it wouldn’t have satisfied my fundamental need to live in a communal past, or what I imagined the past to be like: a world full of antiques. What I could never fathom, and still can’t, really, is that at one point all those things were new. The wheezing Victrola, the hulking davenport — how were they any different from the eight-track tape player or my parents’ Scandinavian dining room set? Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.

Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?

When my older sister and I were young, our mother used to pick out our school clothes and hang them on our doorknobs before we went to bed. “How’s that?” she’d ask, and we’d marvel at these stain-free, empty versions of ourselves. There’s no denying that children were better dressed back then: no cutoffs, no T-shirts, and velveteen for everybody. The boys looked like effeminate homosexuals, and the girls like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? It was only at Halloween that we were allowed to choose our own outfits. One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I was always a hobo. It’s a word you don’t often hear anymore. Along with “tramp,” it’s been replaced by “homeless person,” which isn’t the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something much less threatening, a figure of merriment, almost.

None of this had anything to do with my choice of Halloween costume. I went as a hobo because it was easy: a charcoal beard smudged on the cheeks, pants with holes in them, a hat, an oversized shirt, and a sport coat stained with food and cigarette ash. Take away the hat, and it’s exactly how I’ve dressed since 1978. Throughout the eighties, the look had a certain wayfarer appeal, but now, accented by amber teeth and nicotine-stained fingers, the word I most often hear is “gnarly.” If Hugh is asked directions to the nearest Citibank, I am asked directions to the nearest plasma bank.

This is not to say that I have no standards. The year I turned forty, I threw out all my denim, so instead of crummy jeans I walk around in crummy slacks. I don’t own a pair of sunglasses, or anything with writing on it, and I wear shorts only in Normandy, which is basically West Virginia without the possums. It’s not that I haven’t bought nice clothes — it’s just that I’m afraid to put them on, certain they’ll get burned or stained.

The only expensive thing I actually wear is a navy blue cashmere sweater. It cost four hundred dollars and looks like it was wrestled from the mouth of a tiger. “What a shame,” the dry cleaner said the first time I brought it in. The sweater had been folded into a loaf-sized bundle, and she stroked it, the way you might a freshly dead rabbit. “It’s so soft,” she whispered.

I didn’t dare tell her that the damage was intentional. The lengthy run across the left shoulder, the dozens of holes in the arms and torso; each was specifically placed by the design team. Ordinarily I avoid things that have been distressed, but this sweater had been taken a step further and ruined. Having been destroyed, it is now indestructible, meaning I can wear it without worry. For half this price, I could have bought an intact sweater, thrown it to a tiger, and wrenched it back myself, but after a certain age, who has that kind of time?

My second most expensive purchase was a pair of shoes that look like they belong to a clown. They have what my sister Amy calls “a negative heel,” meaning, I think, that I’m actually taller with just my socks on. While not the ideal choice for someone my size, they’re the only shoes I have that don’t leave me hobbling. My feet are completely flat, but for most of my life they were still shaped like feet. Now, thanks to bunions, they’re shaped more like states, wide boring ones that nobody wants to drive through.

My only regret is that I didn’t buy more clown shoes — a dozen pairs, two dozen, enough to last me for the rest of my life. The thought of the same footwear day after day might bother some people, but if I have one fashion rule, it’s this: never change. That said, things change. I like to think I’m beyond the reach of trends, but my recent infatuation with the man-purse suggests otherwise. It seems I’m still susceptible to embarrassing, rashlike phases, and though I try my best to beat them down, I don’t always succeed. In hopes of avoiding future humiliation, I’ve arranged some of my more glaring mistakes into short lessons I try to review whenever buying anything new. They are as follows:

Guys Look Like Asses in Euro-style Glasses

High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: don’t wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than six feet away I’ll just deal with it when I get there. It might have been different in the eighteenth century when people wore nearly identical wire rims, but today’s wide selection means that in choosing a pair of frames you’re forced to declare yourself a certain type of person, or, in my case, a certain type of insect.

In 1976 my glasses were so big I could clean the lenses with a squeegee. Not only were they huge, they were also green with Playboy emblems embossed on the stems. Today these frames sound ridiculous, but back then they were actually quite stylish. Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion. Though design may reach an apex, it never settles back and calls it quits. Rather, it just keeps reaching, attempting to satisfy our insatiable need to buy new stuff. Squinting is timeless, but so, unfortunately, are the blinding headaches that often accompany it.

In the late 1990s, when I could no longer see my feet, I made an appointment with a Paris eye doctor who ran some tests and sent me off to buy some glasses. I’d like to blame my choice of frames on the fact that I couldn’t see them clearly. I’d like to say they were forced upon me, but neither excuse is true. I made the selection of my own free will and chose them because I thought they made me look smart and international. The frames were made of dark plastic, with rectangular lenses not much larger than my eyes. There was something vaguely familiar about them, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. After picking them up I spent a great deal of time in front of the mirror, pretending to share intelligent comments regarding the state of Europe. “Discount our neighbors to the east, and I think you’ll find we’ve got a sleeping giant on our hands,” I’d say.

I’d been wearing the glasses for close to a year when I finally realized who they rightfully belonged to. This person was not spotted on the cover of Le Point or Foreign Affairs — in fact, it wasn’t even a real person. I was in New York, passing through a toy booth at the Chelsea flea market when I recognized my frames on the smug plastic face of Mrs. Beasley, a middle-aged doll featured on the 1960s television program Family Affair. This was the talking version, original, and in her box.

“Would you like me to pull the string?” the booth owner asked. I said no, and as I hurried away I could swear I heard a small whiny voice saying something about a sleeping giant.

Better the Glasses Than Sweaty Fake Asses

Without a doubt, my best attributes are my calves. I don’t know if they’re earned or genetic, but they’re almost comically muscular, the equivalent of Popeye’s forearms. For years I was complimented on them. Strangers stopped me in the streets. But that all changed with the widespread availability of implants. Now when people look at my legs I sense them wondering why I didn’t have my ass done at the same time. It’s how women with naturally shapely breasts must feel — robbed and full of rage.

In high school I bought a pair of platform shoes, partly because they were popular and partly because I wanted to be tall. I don’t mean that I prayed for height — it never occurred to me that an extra three inches would solve any of my problems. I was just curious. It’s like living on the ground floor and wondering what the view is like two stories up. The shoes I bought were red suede with a solid, slablike sole. I’d have looked less ridiculous with bricks tied to my feet, but of course I couldn’t see it back then. Other guys could get away with platforms, but on me they read as desperation. I wore them to my high school graduation and made a little deal with myself: if I could cross the stage and make it home without falling, I’d learn to accept myself and be happy with what I had. In children’s stories, such lessons are learned for life, but in the real world they usually need reinforcing every few years.

Which takes us to the mid-1990s: my biggest physical gripe is not my height or the arrangement of my facial features, but the fact that I don’t have an ass. Others in my family fared pretty well in that department, but mine amounts to little more than a stunted peach. I’d pretty much resigned myself to long sport coats and untucked shirts when I came across an ad, the boldfaced headline reading, “Tired of Ill-Fitting Pants?” I don’t recall the product’s exact name, but it amounted to a fake padded butt, the shapely synthetic cheeks sewn into the lining of a generous brief. I put it on my Christmas list and was given a pair by my friend Jodi, who waited a few weeks before admitting she’d actually sent me a woman’s ass — in essence, a fanny.

And so it was. But that didn’t stop me from wearing it. Though pear-shaped, my artificial bottom was not without its charms. It afforded me a confidence I hadn’t felt in years and gave me an excuse to buy flattering slacks and waist-length jackets. While walking to the grocery store or post office, I’d invariably find myself passed by a stranger who’d clearly thought he was following somebody else: Little Miss January, or Pamela Anderson’s stunt double.

My fanny kept me warm in the winter and early spring, but come hot weather it turned on me. The problem was the nylon padding, which, when coupled with a high temperature, acted much like a heating pad, causing me to sweat away what little ass I’d had in the first place. Chafed and bony, by early June my natural bottom resembled a rusted coin slot.

It was fun while it lasted, but unless I tore myself away, I knew I’d be relying on prosthetics for the rest of my life. After one last walk around the block, I retired my fanny to its box in the hall closet. There it called to me, sirenlike, until a houseguest arrived, a tall, forlorn-looking woman who compared her ass, and not too favorably, to a cast-iron skillet. “I’ve got just the thing for you,” I said. It wasn’t my intention to give it to her, but after she tried it on, and I saw how happy it made her, how could I not? The woman stayed with us for a week, and while I hated for her to leave, I sort of loved watching her go.

The Feminine Mistake

“Buy it.” This is my sister Amy’s advice in regard to everything, from a taxidermied horse head to a camouflage thong. “Just get it,” she says. “You’ll feel better.”

Eye something closely or pick it up for further inspection, and she’ll move in to justify the cost. “It’s not really that expensive, and, besides, won’t you be getting a tax refund? Go on. Treat yourself.”

The object in question may be completely wrong for me, but still she’ll push, effectively clouding my better instincts. She’s not intentionally evil, my sister, she just loves to see that moment, the split second when doubt is replaced by complete conviction. Yes, I’ll think. I have worked hard, and buying this will bring me the happiness I truly deserve. When handing over my money, I’m convinced that the purchase is not only right, but hard-won and necessary.

In the year 2000 I went on a diet and lost a little too much weight. Amy and I would go out shopping, and when nothing fit me in the men’s department she’d slowly guide me toward the women’s. “This is nice,” she’d say. “Why don’t you try it on?” Once it was a sweater with buttons running down the left side instead of the right. “Oh, come on,” she said. “Do you honestly think people pay attention to things like that?” It did seem unlikely that someone would notice the placement of a button. But what about the shoulder pads?

“We can remove them,” she said. “Go ahead. Get it. It’ll look good on you.”

Though she’d promised that no one would ever notice, you could always tell when I’d been clothes shopping with Amy. I was the guy at the crowded steak house, removing the jacket with a label reading Sassy Sport. That was me with the darts in his shirt, the fabric slack where it should be filled with breasts. I’d step up to the restroom urinal and remember that these particular pants zipped up the back. At this point, people noticed. Amy suggested that a calf-length vest would solve the problem, but I had a better idea. It was called the boy’s department.

With a Pal Like This, Who Needs Enemies

I’ve always liked the idea of accessories, those little pick-me-ups designed to invigorate what has come to feel drab and predictable. A woman might rejuvenate her outfit with a vintage Hermès scarf or jaunty rope belt, but the options for men aren’t nearly so interesting. I have no use for cuff links or suspenders, and while I’ll occasionally pick up a new tie it hardly leaves me feeling “kicky.” Hidden accessories can do the trick, but again they’re mainly the province of women. Garter belt and lingerie — yes. Sock garter and microbrief — no.

It was my search for something discreet, masculine, and practical that led me to the Stadium Pal, an external catheter currently being marketed to sports fans, truck drivers, and anyone else who’s tired of searching for a bathroom. At first inspection, the device met all my criteria:

Was it masculine? Yes, and proudly so. Knowing that no sensible female would ever voluntarily choose to pee in her pants, the manufacturers went ahead and designed the product exclusively for men. Unlike a regular catheter, which is inserted directly into the penis, the Stadium Pal connects by way of a self-adhesive condom, which is then attached to a flexible rubber tube. Urine flows through the tube and collects in the “freedom leg bag,” conveniently attached to the user’s calf. The bag can be emptied and reused up to twelve times, making it both disgusting and cost effective. And what could be manlier?

Was it discreet? According to the brochure, unless you wore it with shorts, no one needed to know anything about it.

Was it practical? At the time, yes. I don’t drive or attend football games, but I did have a book tour coming up, and the possibilities were endless. Five glasses of iced tea followed by a long public reading? Thanks, Stadium Pal! The window seat on an overbooked coast-to-coast flight? Don’t mind if I do!

I ordered myself a Stadium Pal and realized that while it might make sense in a hospital, it really wasn’t very practical for day-to-day use. In an open-air sporting arena, a piping hot thirty-two-ounce bag of urine might go unnoticed, but not so in a stuffy airplane or small, crowded bookstore. An hour after christening it, I smelled like a nursing home. On top of that, I found that it was hard to pee and do other things at the same time. Reading out loud, discussing my beverage options with the flight attendant, checking into a fine hotel: each activity required its own separate form of concentration, and while no one knew exactly what I was up to, it was pretty clear that something was going on. I think it was my face that gave me away. That and my oddly swollen calf.

What ultimately did me in was the self-adhesive condom. Putting it on was no problem, but its removal qualified as what, in certain cultures, is known as a bris. Wear it once, and you’ll need a solid month to fully recover. It will likely be a month in which you’ll weigh the relative freedom of peeing in your pants against the unsightly discomfort of a scab-covered penis, ultimately realizing that, in terms of a convenient accessory, you’re better off with a new watchband.

Never Listen to My Father

It was the weekend of my brother’s wedding, and my father was trying to talk me into a bow tie. “Come on,” he said. “Live a little!” Outside the window, waves pounded against the shore. Seabirds soared overhead screeching what sounded like “Queer, queer, queer.”

When worn with a tuxedo, a bow tie makes a certain kind of sense, but with a suit I wasn’t sure I trusted it. The model my father chose was red-and-white-striped, the size of a luna moth, and as he advanced I backed toward the door.

“It’s just a strip of cloth,” he said. “No different than a regular tie. Who the hell cares if it falls straight or swags from side to side?”

My inner hobo begged me not to do it, but I foolishly caved in, thinking it couldn’t hurt to make an old man happy. Then again, maybe I was just tired and wanted to get through the evening saying as little as possible. The thing about a bow tie is that it does a lot of the talking for you. “Hey!” it shouts. “Look over here. I’m friendly, I’m interesting!” At least that’s what I thought it was saying. It was a great evening, and at the end of it I thanked my father for his recommendation. “I knew you’d like it,” he said. “A guy like you was made for a bow tie.”

A short while after the wedding, while preparing for a monthlong cross-country trip, I bought one of my own and discovered that it said different things to different people. This bow tie was paisley, its dominant color a sort of midnight blue, and while a woman in Columbus thought it made me look scholarly, her neighbor in Cleveland suggested I might be happy selling popcorn.

“Like what’s his name,” she said. “The dead guy.”

“Paul Newman is dead?”

“No,” she said. “That other one. Orville Redenbacher.”

Name association was big, as were my presumed interests in vaudeville and politics. In St. Louis the bow tie was characterized as “very Charlie McCarthy,” while in Chicago a young man defined it as “the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party.” This sent the bow tie back into my suitcase, where it begged forgiveness, evoking the names of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Senator Paul Simon. “Oh come on,” it said. “They were Democrats. Please let me out.”

Political affiliation aside, I know what the young Chicagoan had meant. It’s a pretty sorry world when wearing a bow tie amounts to being “out there.” I’m just not sure which is worse, the people who consider it out there that someone’s wearing a bow tie, or the person who thinks he’s out there for wearing it.

I wore my bow tie to twenty-seven cities, and in each of them I found myself begging for affirmation. “Do you really think it looks OK? Really?” I simply could not tell whether it was right for me. Alone in an elevator I’d have moments of clarity, but just as I reached for the knot, I’d recall some compliment forced from a stranger. “Oh, but it looks so adorable, so cute! I just want to take you home!”

I’m told by my father that when I was an infant, people would peek into my carriage and turn to my mother saying, “Goodness, what a . . . baby.” I’ve never been described as cute, so why now? What was the bow tie saying behind my back? And how could I put it in contact with twenty-year-old marines rather than seventy-year-old women?

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. “A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection.”

And that is exactly what a bow tie says. Not that you’re powerless, but that you’re impotent. People offer to take you home not because you’re sexy but because you’re sexless, a neutered cat in need of a good stiff cuddle. This doesn’t mean that the bow tie is necessarily wrong for me, just that it’s a bit premature. When I explained this to my father, he rolled his eyes. Then he said that I had no personality. “You’re a lump.”

He sees the bow tie, at least in my case, as a bright string wrapped around a run-of-the-mill gift. On opening the package, the receiver is bound to be disappointed, so why set yourself up? It’s a question my father answers in the pained, repetitive voice of a parole officer. According to him, you set yourself up in order to exceed those expectations. “You dress to give a hundred percent, and then you give a hundred and twenty. Jesus,” he says. “You’re a grown man. Haven’t we been through this?”

Grown or not, I still feel best — more true to myself — when dressed like a hobo. The die was cast for me on Halloween, and though it has certainly not been proven, I think it’s this way for everyone. Look at my brother, who dressed as an ax murderer, and at my sister Amy, who went as a confused prostitute. As for the other kids in my neighborhood, the witches and ghosts, the vampires, robots, and, oh God, the mummies, I can only hope that, like me, they work at home.

Road Trips

The house I grew up in is located in a subdivision, and when my family first arrived the front yards were, if not completely bare, then at least close to it. It was my father who rallied the neighbors and initiated a campaign to plant maples along the side of the road. Holes were dug, saplings were delivered, and my sisters and I remarked that, with the exception of birds, trees were the only things on earth that weren’t cute when they were babies. They looked like branches stuck into the ground, and I remember thinking that by the time they were fully grown I would be old.

And that’s pretty much what happened.

Throughout my teens and early twenties, I’d wonder if my father hadn’t made a mistake and ordered pygmy maples, if such a thing exists. During my thirties, they grew maybe three feet, tops, but after that their development was astonishing. The last time I saw them, they were actual trees, so tall that the upper branches on the left side of the road mingled with those on the right, forming a solid canopy of shade. This was a few years ago. I was in Raleigh for the night, and my father took me to a party hosted by one of his neighbors. I used to know everyone on our street, but since I’d left there had been a lot of turnover. People die, or move into condominiums, and their homes are sold to young married couples who scrap the earth-toned carpets and build islands in the kitchens. The interiors of these houses used to look the same, and, eventually, as each is bought and remodeled, they’ll look the same again, but in a different way.

The party was held at what I thought of as “the Rosens’ place,” though that was two owners ago. The hostess was one of the new people, as were her guests, and it surprised me that my dad knew everyone’s name. Here were Phil and Becky, Ashley and Dave, and a high-spirited fifteen-year-old, who threw himself onto the sofa with great flourish and referred to my father as a she, as in “Lou Sedaris, who invited her?”

“My son is gay!” the boy’s mother announced, as if none of us had figured this out yet. He may have attended one of those magnet schools for the arts, but still it floored me that a ninth grader in Raleigh, North Carolina — on the street where I grew up — could comfortably identify himself as a homosexual. I felt like someone in a ten-pound leg brace meeting a beneficiary of the new polio vaccine. “She just happens to be my father, young man, and I’d appreciate it if you’d show her a little respect.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

When I was this kid’s age, you’d be burned alive for such talk. Being a homosexual was unthinkable, and so you denied it, and found a girlfriend who was willing to settle for the sensitive type. On dates, you’d remind her that sex before marriage was just that, sex: what dogs did in the front yard. This as opposed to making love, which was more what you were about. A true union of souls could take anywhere from eight to ten years to properly establish, but you were willing to wait, and for this the mothers loved you. You sometimes discussed it with them over an iced tea, preferably on the back porch when your girlfriend’s brother was mowing the lawn with his shirt off.

I kept my secret to myself until I was twenty years old, and I might have kept it even longer had a couple not picked me up when I was hitchhiking one night. It was 1:00 a.m., and the last thing I expected was a ride in a Cadillac. Stranger still was opening the back door and discovering that the people inside were old — my parents’ age, at least. The car smelled of hair tonic. A CB radio crackled from its berth beside the steering wheel, and I wondered who they could be talking to at this time of night. Then I noticed that the woman was wearing a negligee. She leaned forward to press the cigarette lighter, and I could see a tag the size of an index card showing through the sheer fabric at the back of her neck. We drove in silence for a mile or two before the man turned in his seat and asked, as if he were inquiring about my health, “How’d you like to eat my wife’s pussy?”

Then the woman turned as well, and it was to her that I made my confession: “I’m a homosexual.” I’d been waiting to unload this for as long as I could remember, and, amid the screeching of tires and the violent swerve to the side of the road, I felt all the relief I’d imagined I would.

A few months later I said the same thing to my best friend, Ronnie, who pretended to be surprised and then admitted that she’d known all along. “It’s the way you run,” she said. “You let your arms flop instead of holding them to your sides.”

“Work on your run,” I wrote in my diary the following morning.

At the age that many would consider their heyday, I had not had sex with anyone. My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company.

Next on my list of people to tell was my former college roommate, Todd. I hitched from Raleigh to Kent, Ohio, but once I got there, the time didn’t seem quite right. It was harder telling a guy than it was telling a girl, and harder still when you’d taken too much acid and were trying to keep the little people from sticking pins in your eyes.

After my failure in Ohio, I headed back south. It was early December, and I had forgotten how cold it could get in the Midwest.

Todd had suggested that I take his down jacket, but I thought it was unsightly, so here I was in a thrift-shop overcoat that didn’t even button all the way up. He’d also offered a sweater that belted at the waist. It was thick and patterned in bright colors, the sort of thing a peasant might wear while herding llamas, but I’d said, “No, it might ruin my silhouette.” That was the phrase I had used, and now I was paying for my vanity — because what difference would it have made? “Oh, goodness, I can’t give him a ride. He looks too lumpy.”

I’d left Kent at eight in the morning, and the next five hours had taken me less than fifty miles. Now it was lunchtime — not that there was anywhere to buy it, or anything much to buy it with. It began to rain, and, just as I thought of turning back, a tow truck pulled over and the driver motioned for me to get in. He told me that he wasn’t going far — just thirty miles up the road — but I was grateful for the warmth and climbed into the passenger seat determined to soak up as much of it as I possibly could.

“So,” the man said after I had settled in, “where you from?” I pegged him to be somewhere between old and ancient, midforties, maybe, with gray-tinged sideburns shaped like boots.

I told him I was from North Carolina, and he slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “North Carolina. Now, there’s a state for you. My brother and me went down on vacation — Topsail Beach, I think it was — and we just had the time of our lives.”

When the man turned to address me, I noticed that his ears stuck out and that his forehead was divided almost in two by a vertical dent that started at the intersection of his eyebrows and ran to within an inch of his hairline. It was the type of thing associated with heavy thought, but this was so deep and painful-looking that it might have been left by a hatchet.

“Yessiree, good old North Carolina,” the man continued. “N.C., I guess you call it down there.”

He went on about the state’s climate and the friendliness of its people, and then he looked into his side mirror to monitor the progress of an advancing eighteen-wheeler. “All I know is that if anyone wanted to give me a blow job, or have me give him one, I’d do it.”

This came out of nowhere, and what threw me was the way he’d attached it to his previous observation. North Carolina is temperate and populated with well-meaning people; therefore I will engage in oral sex with another man.

“Well,” I said, “they’re not all friendly. I remember one time I was walking down the street and a group of men grabbed me by the arms and spit in my face.” The story was true, and, at its mention, I recalled the stench of their sour, phlegm-clotted saliva. I expected, and reasonably so, that the tow truck driver might ask for details: “Who were these men? Why did they spit in your face?”

But instead he picked up where he’d left off. “I mean to tell you that I would actually crouch down on this seat and perform fellatio,” he said. “Either that or I’d sit up while someone performed it on me. I really would.”

“Then, another time,” I told him, “another time this guy threatened to knock my teeth down my throat. I was just standing there minding my own business, and all of a sudden there he was.” This was a lie, or at least the last part was. The man had threatened to knock my teeth down my throat, but only because my friend and I had given him the finger and called him a crusty old redneck. “I was twelve years old at the time,” I said. “In Ohio you’d never threaten a kid like that, but down in North Carolina it’s par for the course.”

Par for the course. I was sounding more idiotic by the minute — not that it mattered.

“I mean, why not give someone a blow job?” the driver said. “It’s just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking.”

Outside the moving truck were flat, barren fields, some bordered by stands of trees and others stretching without interruption out to the horizon. One second they’d appear as a blur, and then the windshield wiper would make its shuddering pass and everything would leap back into focus. A station wagon pulled in front of us, and the children in the backseat signaled for my driver to blow his horn. He seemed not to notice them, and just as I thought to bring it to his attention I realized that the request included the word “blow.” And so I let it drop and turned my attention back to the landscape.

Had I been able to address the real subject, I’d have told this man that I was saving myself for the right person. I wanted my first time to be special, meaning that I would know the other guy’s name and, I hoped, his telephone number. After sex, we would lie in each other’s arms and review the events that had brought us to this point. I could not predict exactly what this conversation would sound like, but I had not imagined it to include such lines as “I knew this would happen five minutes ago, the moment you climbed into my tow truck.” Not that I minded this man’s profession. It was the other stuff that bothered me: his dent, his forwardness, and his persistent refusal to turn the goddamn page. He sounded like me when I sensed that drugs were around: “All I know is that if someone wants to get high, or wants to watch while I smoke his dope, I’ll do it. I really will.”

I cringed to think of myself, skeeving pot off my friends and believing all the while that I was sounding casual. After dropping in uninvited and basically forcing someone to share his drugs, I’d pocket the roach and take my leave, saying, “That’s the last time I let you fuck me up like this, I mean it.”

“Yes, indeedy,” the tow truck driver said. “A little oral give-and-take would feel pretty good right about now.”

I could have ended it so simply. “I don’t think my girlfriend would like that too much,” I might have said, but I wanted to put that particular lie behind me. There was my life before I told a strange woman in a negligee that I was a homosexual, and now there would be my life after, two chapters so dissimilar in style and content that they might have been written by different people. That’s what I’d hoped, but of course it wouldn’t work out that way. I needed a story that I could live with, and so I compromised and told the tow truck driver that I had an ex-girlfriend. “We just broke up a week ago, and now I’m going home to win her back.”

“So?” he said. “I got an ex-wife. I got a current one, too, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t feel good to give someone a blow job, or to have somebody give you one while you laid back and enjoyed it a little.”

Mine was the lie that got you nowhere, and, as I berated myself for wasting it, the driver took his right hand off the steering wheel and laid it on the seat between us. For a moment it was idle, and then it began to lumber in my direction, its movement as hesitant and blocky as a turtle’s. “Yessiree,” its owner said.

There would come times in later years when I would have sex against my wishes. No one forced me, exactly — it wasn’t that. I just wasn’t sure how to say “Go. Get out. I don’t want this.” Often, I’d feel sorry for the guy: he was deformed through no fault of his own, he bought all his clothes at Sears, he said he loved me on the first date. Once or twice I’d be too scared to say no, but this particular man didn’t frighten me. I looked at him in much the same way that the fifteen-year-old, my father’s neighbor, must have looked at me: as a relic of an earlier era, when trees were stubs, women could be deceived, and everything inside your home was the color of rust or dirt.

When the shambling hand at last reached my coat, I thought of how I’d assert myself and tell the driver that this was an excellent place for me to get out.

“What?” he’d say? “Here? Are you sure?”

The man would pull over, and I would take my place by the side of the road, a virgin with three dollars in his pocket, and his whole life ahead of him.

What I Learned

It’s been interesting to walk around campus this afternoon, as when I went to Princeton things were completely different. This chapel, for instance — I remember when it was just a clearing, cordoned off with sharp sticks. Prayer was compulsory back then, and you couldn’t just fake it by moving your lips; you had to know the words, and really mean them. I’m dating myself, but this was before Jesus Christ. We worshipped a God named Sashatiba, who had five eyes, including one on the Adam’s apple. None of us ever met him, but word had it that he might appear at any moment, so we were always at the ready. Whatever you do, don’t look at his neck, I used to tell myself.

It’s funny now, but I thought about it a lot. Some people thought about it a little too much, and it really affected their academic performance. Again, I date myself, but back then we were on a pass-fail system. If you passed, you got to live, and if you failed you were burned alive on a pyre that’s now the Transgender Studies Building. Following the first grading period, the air was so thick with smoke you could barely find your way across campus. There were those who said that it smelled like meat, no different from a barbecue, but I could tell the difference. I mean, really. Since when do you grill hair? Or sweaters? Or those dumb, chunky shoes we all used to wear?

It kept you on your toes, though, I’ll say that much. If I’d been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me, especially my father, who meant well but was just a little too gung ho for my taste. He had the whole outfit: Princeton breastplate, Princeton nightcap; he even got the velvet cape with the tiger head hanging like a rucksack from between the shoulder blades. In those days, the mascot was a saber-tooth, so you can imagine how silly it looked, and how painful it was to lean back in your chair. Then, there was his wagon, completely covered with decals and bumper stickers: “I Hold My Horses for Ivy League Schools,” “My Son Was Accepted at the Best University in the United States, and All I Got Was a Bill for $168,000.” On and on, which was just so . . . wrong.

One of the things they did back then was start you off with a modesty seminar, an eight-hour session that all the freshmen had to sit through. It might be different today, but in my time it took the form of a role-playing exercise, my classmates and I pretending to be graduates, and the teacher assuming the part of an average citizen: the soldier, the bloodletter, the whore with a heart of gold.

“Tell me, young man. Did you attend a university of higher learning?”

To anyone holding a tool or a weapon, we were trained to respond, “What? Me go to college? Whoever gave you that idea?” If, on the other hand, the character held a degree, you were allowed to say, “Sort of,” or, sometimes, “I think so.”

And it was the next bit that you had to get just right. Inflection was everything, and it took the foreign students forever to master it.

“So where do you sort of think you went?”

And we’d say, “Umm, Princeton?” — as if it were an oral exam, and we weren’t quite sure that this was the correct answer.

“Princeton! My goodness,” the teacher would say. “That must have been quite something!”

You had to let him get it out, but once he started in on how brilliant and committed you must be it was time to hold up your hands, saying, “Oh, it isn’t that hard to get into.”

Then he’d say, “Really? But I heard —”

“Wrong,” you’d tell him. “You heard wrong. It’s not that great of a school.”

This was the way it had to be done. You had to play it down, which wasn’t easy when your dad was out there, reading your acceptance letter into a bullhorn.

I needed to temper his enthusiasm a bit, and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide. The Princeton program was very strong back then, the best in the country, but it wasn’t the sort of thing your father could get too worked up about. Or at least, most fathers wouldn’t. Mine was over the moon. “Killed by a Princeton graduate!” he said. “And my own son, no less.”

My mom was actually jealous. “So what’s wrong with matricide?” she asked. “What, I’m not good enough to murder? You too high and mighty to take out your only mother?”

They started bickering, so in order to make peace, I promised to consider a double major.

“And how much more is that going to cost us?” they said.

Those last few months at home were pretty tough, but then I started my freshman year and got caught up in the life of the mind. My idol-worship class was the best, but my dad didn’t get it at all. “What the hell does that have to do with patricide?” he asked.

And I said, “Umm. Everything.”

He didn’t understand that it’s all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that raises its head and nods like a cobra when you’re sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it’s even wilder and appears to eat things. But not having gone to college, my dad had no concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education. He thought that all my classes should be murder-related, with no lunch breaks or anything. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t work that way.

I’d told my parents I’d major in killing them, but that was just to get them off my back. In truth, I had no idea what I wanted to study, so for the first few years I took everything that came my way. History was interesting, but I have no head for dates and tend to get my eras confused. I enjoyed pillaging and astrology, but the thing that ultimately stuck was comparative literature. There wasn’t much of it to compare back then, no more than a handful of epic poems and one novel about a lady detective, but that’s part of what I liked about it. The field was new and full of possibilities. A well-versed graduate might go anywhere, but try telling that to my parents.

“You mean you won’t be killing us?” my mother said. “But I told everyone you were going for that double major.”

Dad followed his “I’m-so-disappointed” speech with a lecture on career opportunities. “You’re going to study literature and get a job doing what?” he said. “Literaturizing?”

We spent my entire vacation arguing; then, just before I went back to school, my father approached me in my bedroom. “Promise me you’ll keep an open mind,” he said. And as he left, he slipped an engraved dagger into my book bag.

I had many fine teachers during my years at Princeton, but the one I think of most often was my fortune-telling professor, a complete hag with wild gray hair, warts the size of new potatoes, the whole nine yards. She taught us to forecast the weather up to two weeks in advance, but ask for anything weightier, and you were likely to be disappointed.

The alchemy majors all wanted to know how much money they’d be making after graduation. “Just give us an approximate figure,” they’d say, and the professor would shake her head and cover her crystal ball with a little cozy given to her by one of her previous classes. When it came to our futures, she drew the line, no matter how hard we begged — and, I mean, we really tried. I was as let down as the next guy, but, in retrospect, I can see that she acted in our best interest. Look at yourself on the day that you graduated from college, then look at yourself today. I did that recently, and it was like, “Yikes! What the hell happened?”

The answer, of course, is life. What the hag chose not to foretell — and what we, in our certainty, could not have fathomed — is that stuff comes up. Weird doors open. People fall into things. Maybe the engineering whiz will wind up brewing cider, not because he has to, but because he finds it challenging. Who knows? Maybe the athlete will bring peace to all nations, or the class moron will go on to become the president of the United States — though that’s more likely to happen at Harvard or Yale, schools that will pretty much let in anybody.

There were those who left Princeton and soared like arrows into the bosoms of power and finance, but I was not one of them. My path was a winding one, with plenty of obstacles along the way. When school was finished, I went back home, an Ivy League graduate with four years’ worth of dirty laundry and his whole life ahead of him. “What are you going to do now?” my parents asked.

And I said, “Well, I was thinking of washing some of these underpants.”

That took six months. Then I moved on to the shirts.

“Now what?” my parents asked.

And when I told them I didn’t know, they lost what little patience they had left. “What kind of a community-college answer is that?” my mother said. “You went to the best school there is. How can you not know something?”

And I said, “I don’t know.”

In time my father stopped wearing his Princeton gear. My mother stopped talking about my “potential,” and she and my dad got themselves a brown and white puppy. In terms of intelligence, it was just average, but they couldn’t see that at all. “Aren’t you just the smartest dog in the world?” they’d ask, and the puppy would lick their fingers in a way that was disturbingly familiar.

My first alumni weekend cheered me up a bit. It was nice to know that I wasn’t the only unemployed graduate in the world, but the warm feeling evaporated when I got back home and saw that my parents had given the dog my bedroom. Above the dresser, in place of the Princeton pennant they’d bought me for my first birthday, was a banner reading “Westminster or Bust.”

I could see which way the wind was blowing, and so I left and moved to the city, where a former classmate, a philosophy major, got me a job on his ragpicking crew. When the industry moved overseas — the doing of another former classmate — I stayed put and eventually found work skinning hides for a rat catcher, a thin, serious man with the longest beard I had ever seen.

At night, I read and reread the handful of books I’d taken with me when I left home, and eventually, out of boredom as much as anything else, I started to write myself. It wasn’t much, at first: character sketches, accounts of my day, parodies of articles in the alumni newsletter. Then, in time, I became more ambitious and began crafting little stories about my family. I read one of them out loud to the rat catcher, who’d never laughed at anything, but roared at the description of my mother and her puppy. “My mom was just the same,” he said. “I graduated from Brown, and two weeks later she was raising falcons on my top bunk!” The story about my dad defecating in his neighbor’s well pleased my boss so much that he asked for a copy and sent it to his own father.

This gave me the confidence to continue, and in time I completed an entire book, which was subsequently published. I presented a first edition to my parents, who started with the story about our neighbor’s well, and then got up to close the drapes. Fifty pages later, they were boarding up the door and looking for ways to disguise themselves.

Other people had loved my writing, but these two didn’t get it at all. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

My father adjusted his makeshift turban and sketched a mustache on my mother’s upper lip. “What’s wrong?” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong: you’re killing us.”

“But I thought that’s what you wanted?”

“We did,” my mother wept, “but not this way.”

It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, but I seemed to have come full circle. What started as a dodge had inadvertently become my life’s work, an irony I never could have appreciated had my extraordinary parents not put me through Princeton.

That’s Amore

Beside our apartment building in New York, there was a narrow gangway, and every evening, just after dark, rats would emerge from it and flock to the trash cans lining the curb. The first time I saw them, I started and screamed, but after that I made it a point to walk on the other side of the street, pausing and squinting to take them all in. It was like moving to Alaska and seeing a congregation of bears — I knew to expect them, but still I could never quite believe my eyes. Every now and then, one of them would get flattened by a cab, and I’d bend over the body, captivated by the foulness of it. Twenty, maybe thirty seconds of reverie, and then the spell would be broken, sometimes by the traffic, but more often by my neighbor Helen, who’d shout at me from her window.

Like the rats that spilled from the gangway, she was exactly the type of creature I’d expected to find living in New York. Arrogant, pushy, proudly, almost fascistically opinionated, she was the person you found yourself quoting at dinner parties, especially if your hosts were on the delicate side and you didn’t much care about being invited back. Helen on politics, Helen on sex, Helen on race relations: the response at the table was almost always the same. “Oh, that’s horrible. And where did you know this person from?”

It was Hugh who first met her. This was in New York, on Thompson Street, in the fall of 1991. There was a combination butcher shop and café there, and he mentioned to the owner that he was looking to rent an apartment. While talking, he noticed a woman standing near the door, seventy at least, and no taller than a ten-year-old girl. She wore a sweat suit, tight through the stomach and hips. It wasn’t the pastel-colored, ladylike kind, but just plain gray, like a boxer’s. Her glasses were wing-shaped, and at their center, just over her nose, was a thick padding of duct tape. Helen, she said her name was. Hugh nodded hello, and as he turned to leave, she pointed to some bags lying at her feet. “Carry my groceries upstairs.” She sounded like a man, or, rather, a hit man, her voice coarse and low, like heavy footsteps on gravel.

“Now?” Hugh asked.

She said, “What? You got something better to do?”

They walked into the building next door, a tenement, and were on the second floor, slowly climbing to the fifth, when she told him of a vacant apartment. The former tenant had died a month earlier, and his place would be available in a week or so. Helen was not the super or the manager. She had no official title but was friendly with the landlord, and thus had a key. “I can let you have a look, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get it.”

As one-bedrooms went, this was on the small side, narrow too, and as low-ceilinged as a trailer. The walls were covered with cheap dark paneling, but that could be gotten rid of easily enough. What sold Hugh was the ferocity of the sunlight, that and the location. He got the address of the landlord, and before leaving to fill out an application he gave this Helen woman seventy-five dollars. “Just for showing me the place,” he told her. She stuffed the money down the front of her sweatshirt, and then she made sure we got the apartment.

I first saw it a few days later. Hugh was in the living room taking down the paneling while I sat on a paint bucket and tried to come to terms with my disappointment. For starters, there was the kitchen floor. The tiles there were brown and tan and ocher, the colors seemingly crocheted as they would be on an afghan. Then there was the size. I was wondering how two people could possibly live in such a tight space, when there was a knock at the unlocked door, and this woman I didn’t know stepped uninvited onto the horrible tiles. Her hair was dyed the color of a new penny, and she wore it pulled back into a thumb-sized ponytail. This put the focus on her taped-up glasses, and on her lower jaw, which stuck out slightly, like a drawer that hadn’t quite been closed. “Can I help you?” I asked, and her hand went to a whistle that hung from a string around her neck.

“Mess with me, and I’ll stick my foot so far up your ass I’ll lose my shoe.”

Someone says this, and you naturally look down, or at least I do. The woman’s feet were tiny, no longer than hot dog buns. She had on puffy sneakers, cheap ones made of air and some sort of plastic, and, considering them, I frowned.

“They might be small, but they’ll still do the job, don’t you worry,” she said.

Right about then, Hugh stepped out of the living room with a scrap of paneling in his hand. “Have you met Helen?” he asked.

The woman unfurled a few thick fingers, the way you might when working an equation: 2 young men + 1 bedroom ugly paneling = fags. “Yeah, we met.” Her voice was heavy with disdain. “We met, all right.”

For the first few weeks that we lived in the apartment, Helen clearly preferred Hugh over me. “My boyfriend,” she called him. Then the two of them got to talking, and she switched her allegiance. I knew I’d won her favor when she invited me into her kitchen. Owing to her Sicilian blood, Helen had an innate gift for cooking. This she boasted as she jammed meatballs into a frozen store-bought pie crust. Then she drowned them in a mixture of beaten eggs and skim milk. “My Famous Italian Quiche,” she called it. Other dishes included “My Famous Eggplant Parmesan with the Veal in It,” “My Famous Tomato Gravy with Rice and Canned Peas,” and “My Famous Spaghetti and Baked Bean Casserole.” If Helen’s food was truly famous, it was so in the way of sun poisoning and growling dogs with foam on their lips: things you avoided if you knew what was good for you. If I was superstoned I might wash the sauce off a bit of veal and eat it atop a cracker, but, for the most part, her food went straight into the trash can.

Throughout the seven years Hugh and I lived on Thompson Street, our lives followed a simple pattern. He would get up early and leave the house no later than 8:00. I was working for a housecleaning company, and though my schedule varied from day to day, I usually didn’t start until 10:00. My only real constant was Helen, who would watch Hugh leave the building, and then cross the hall to lean on our doorbell. I would wake up, and just as I was belting my robe, the ringing would be replaced by a pounding, frantic and relentless, the way you might rail against a coffin lid if you’d accidentally been buried alive.

“All right, all right.”

“What were you, asleep?” Helen would say as I opened the door. “I’ve been up since five.” In her hand would be an aluminum tray covered with foil, either that or a saucepan with a lid on it.

“Well,” I’d tell her, “I didn’t go to bed until three.”

“I didn’t go to bed until three thirty.”

This was how it was with her: If you got fifteen minutes of sleep, she got only ten. If you had a cold, she had a flu. If you’d dodged one bullet, she’d dodged five. Blindfolded. After my mother’s funeral, I remember her greeting me with “So what? My mother died when I was half your age.”

“Gosh,” I said. “Think of everything she missed.”

To Helen, a gift was not something you gave to person number one, but something you didn’t give to person number two. This was how we wound up with a Singer sewing machine, the kind built into a table. A woman on the third floor made her own clothes and, in her own quiet way, had asked if she could have it.

“So you want my sewing machine, do you?” Helen said. “Let me think about it.” Then she picked up the phone and gave Hugh and me a call. “I got something for you,” she told us. “The only deal is that you can’t give it to nobody else, especially nobody who lives in this building on the third floor.”

“But we don’t need a sewing machine,” I said.

“What, are you saying you already have one?”

“Well, no —”

“All right then, so shut up. Everybody needs a sewing machine, especially this one — top of the line. I can’t tell you all the outfits I made over the years.”

“Yes, but —”

“But nothing. It’s a present from me to you.”

As Hugh manhandled it through our door, I tried to block him. “But there’s hardly enough room for us,” I said. “Where are we supposed to put a full-sized sewing machine? I mean, really, why not just give us a tugboat? It would take up the same amount of space.”

Hugh, though, you really have to hand it to him. He sat on the horrid little bench that came with the machine, and five minutes later he was teaching himself to sew. That’s the kind of person he is — capable of anything.

“Can you make a body bag?” I asked.

Every day for the next six months, Helen mentioned her gift. “So how’s that Singer? You made any pants yet? You made any jeans?”

It was the same with the food she gave us. “So did you like the turkey meat loaf with Italian seasoning?”

“Very much.”

“Nobody makes it like me, you know.”

“You won’t get any argument there.”

The food Helen brought was presented as a slight to the couple next door. “The sons of bitches, if they knew that I was making this for you, they’d die.”

The common areas of our building were covered in small ceramic tiles, giving the impression that you were in an empty pool. Even the slightest noises were amplified, so with very little effort, your voice could be deafening. Standing in the hallway outside my door, Helen would shout so loud that the overhead lights would dim. “All week they’ve been trying to beg food off of me. ‘What’s that that smells so delicious?’ they want to know. ‘You got any extras that need a good home? We’re practically dying of hunger over here.’”

In real life the couple next door were pleasant and soft-spoken. At the time we moved in, the wife had already developed Alzheimer’s, and her husband, an eighty-five-year-old man named Joe, was doing his best to care for her. I never heard him whine or grovel, so that, I suspected, was just wishful thinking on Helen’s part. None of her impersonations were very good, but there was no denying her showmanship. She was a dynamic person, and even Joe, whom she was crueler to than anyone, was quick to acknowledge her weird star power. “A real pistol,” he’d call her. “A peach of a girl.”

“Begging off of me when he’s got his railroad pension, that plus the social security. The both of them can go fuck themselves,” Helen would shout.

Hugh is the type who’d hear this sort of thing, and say, “Oh, come on, now. That’s no way to talk about your neighbors.”

This was why Helen waited until he left for work every morning — he was a downer. “Living with someone like that, I’d go crazy,” she’d say. “Jesus Christ, I don’t know how you can stand it.”

Before moving to New York I spent six years in Chicago. During most of that time, I lived with my then boyfriend and, between the two of us, we seemed to know a fair number of people. There were wild dinners, wild parties — always something fun and druggy going on. Never again would I have so many friends, and such good ones, though I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps I’ve grown less likable over the years, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how to meet people. The initial introduction — the shaking-hands part — I can still manage. It’s the follow-up that throws me. Who calls whom, and how often? What if you decide after the second or third meeting that you don’t really like this person? Up to what point are you allowed to back out? I used to know these things, but now they’re a mystery.

Had I met Helen when I was in my twenties, we wouldn’t have spent nearly so much time together. I’d have been off with people my own age, either taking drugs or looking for them, this as opposed to drinking instant coffee and listening to someone talk about her colitis. When Helen said “oil,” it sounded like “earl.” Subsequently, “toilet” came out as “terlet,” as in “I was up and back to the fucking terlet six times last night. Shit so hard I think I sprained my asshole.”

That we both found this fascinating was, I suppose, proof that we had at least one thing in common. Another thing we could always agree on was a soap opera called One Life to Live. It aired in the early afternoon, and, often, when I wasn’t working, I’d go across the hall and watch it at her place.

Helen had lived in the same apartment for close to fifty years, though you’d never know to look at it. I had stuff everywhere — the sewing machine, for example — but her living room, much like her kitchen, was spartan. On one wall was a framed photograph of herself, but no pictures of her daughters, or any of her seven grandchildren. There were no chairs, either, just a sofa and a coffee table. These faced the room’s only extravagance: a tower of three televisions stacked one atop another. I don’t know why she kept them. The black-and-white model on the bottom had died years earlier, and the one above it had no volume control. This left the TV at the top of the pile. It blathered away, all but ignored in favor of the window, which afforded a view of the entire block and was Helen’s preferred source of entertainment. When in the living room, she usually sat on the radiator, her lower half indoors and her head and shoulders as far out as they could go. The waitress on the second floor coming home at 2:00 a.m., the shopkeeper across the street accepting a package from the UPS man, a woman in a convertible applying lipstick: nothing escaped her attention.

During the years I knew her, I’d guess that Helen spent a good ten hours a day at her window. Midmornings you could find her in the kitchen, but at 11:00, when the soap operas began, she’d switch off the radio and return to her perch. It hurt her neck to turn from the street to the screen, so most programs were listened to rather than watched. Exceptions were made for Friday episodes of One Life to Live, and, occasionally, for Oprah, who was one of the few black people Helen had any regard for. Perhaps in the past she had been more open-minded, but getting mugged in the foyer of our building convinced her that they were all crooks and sex maniacs. “Even the light-skinned ones.”

Talk show hosts were scumbags as well, but Oprah; anyone could see that she was different. While the rest of the pack accentuated the negative, she encouraged people to feel good about themselves, be they single mothers — a group that had included Helen — or horribly disfigured children. “I never would have thought about it, but I guess that girl does have a pretty eye,” she once said, referring to the young Cyclops fidgeting on the screen.

One afternoon Oprah interviewed a group of women who had overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Susan fell overboard while sailing and managed to survive for six days by clinging to a cooler. Colleen taught herself to read and got a job as an executive secretary. The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw. The poet and I had met and spoken on several occasions. Now here she was on Oprah, and nothing would do until I ran across the hall to tell Helen. She’d been half watching from her spot on the radiator and didn’t seem terribly impressed with my news.

“You don’t get it,” I said, and I pointed to the screen. “I know that person. She’s my friend.” It was too strong a word for what was, at best, a nodding relationship, but Helen didn’t need to know that.

“So what?” she said.

“So I have a friend on Oprah.”

“Big deal. You think that makes you special?”

If Helen had known someone who’d appeared on Oprah, she’d have had T-shirts made up, but of course that was different. She was allowed to brag and name-drop, but no one else was. Announce an accomplishment — signing a book contract, getting your play reviewed in the Times — and her hackles would go up. “You think your shit smells better than mine? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“But you’re old,” I once told her. “Your job is to be happy for me.”

“Stick it up your ass,” she said. “I’m not your goddamn mother.”

With the exception of my immediate family, no one could provoke me quite like Helen could. One perfectly aimed word, and within an instant I was eight years old and unable to control my temper. I often left her apartment swearing I’d never return. Once I slammed her door so hard, her clock fell off the wall, but still I went back — “crawled back,” she would say — and apologized. It seemed wrong to yell at a grandmother, but more than that I found that I missed her, or at least missed someone I could so easily drop in on. The beauty of Helen was that she was always there, practically begging to be disturbed. Was that a friend, or had I chosen the wrong word? What was the name for this thing we had?

When I told Hugh about the Oprah business, he said, “Well, of course she acted that way. You were being pretentious.”

The word threw me. “‘Pretentious’ is knowing someone who met Pina Bausch, not someone who met Oprah.”

“It depends on what circles you’re running in,” he said, and I supposed he was right, not that it gave Helen anything to be snippy about. I’d lost count of all the times she’d mentioned her friendship with John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime family. “He’s a very good-looking man,” she’d say. “Pictures don’t do him justice.” After pressing, I learned that by “friend” she meant they had been introduced at a party thirty years earlier and had danced for two minutes before someone cut in. “John is very light on his feet,” she told me. “That’s something most people don’t know about him.”

“Maybe they’ll bring it up at his murder trial,” I said.

Helen fell in the tub and sprained her wrist. “That’s it for the cooking,” she told us. “You’re not getting any more free meals out of me.”

Hugh and I shuffled back across the hall and shut the door behind us. No more “Famous Veal Cutlet”! No more “Famous Sausage Casserole”! No more “Famous Chicken with the Oriental Vegetables”! We could hardly believe our luck.

While Helen was laid up, I went to the store for her. Hugh took down her trash and delivered her mail. Joe, a widower now, offered to help as well. “Anything that needs doing around the house, you just let me know,” he told her. He meant that he’d change lightbulbs or run a mop across her floor, but Helen took it the wrong way and threw him out of her apartment. “He wants to give me a bath,” she told me. “He wants to see my twat.”

It was shocking to hear this word from a seventy-three-year-old woman, and in response I winced.

“What?” she said. “You think I ain’t got one?”

Three months after Hugh joined the scenic union, the membership voted to go on strike. This is the group that paints backdrops for movies and plays. I wanted to be supportive, and so I tried coming up with slogans that might sound good on a picket sign: “Broadway Gives 829 the Brush-off” was my idea, as was “Scenic Painters Find New Contract Unpaletteable.”

On the first morning of the strike, Hugh left the house at 7:00 a.m. A short while later, Helen called. I normally wouldn’t pick up at that hour, but her voice on the machine was slurred and frantic, and so I answered. Since I had known her, Helen had, in her words, “taken” three strokes. They were, she’d admit, little ones, but still it worried me that she might have had another, and so I got dressed and headed across the hall to her apartment. The door jerked open before I could knock, and she stood in the frame, her lower jaw sunken, the lip invisible. It seemed that she had been at her window, surveying the scene below, and when the super in the building across the street threw a lit cigarette into our trash can, she yelled at him with such force that she blew her lower plate right out of her mouth. “Itch in da schwubs,” she said. “Go giddit.”

A minute later I was downstairs searching the planter in front of our building. There I found a beer bottle, a slice of pizza with ants on it, and, finally, the dentures, incredibly unbroken by their five-story fall. It is not unpleasant to hold someone else’s warm teeth in your hand, and before returning upstairs, I paused, studying the damp plastic horseshoe that served as Helen’s gum. What made it all look so fake was its perfection. No single tooth protruded or towered above its neighbor. Even in shape and color, they resembled a row of ceramic tiles.

Back upstairs, I found Helen waiting on the landing. She slid the dentures, unwashed, back into her mouth, and it was like popping the batteries into a particularly foul toy. “Rat bastard motherfucker could have set our whole building on fire.”

In the mornings Helen listened to the radio, an oldies station I referred to as “K-WOP.” All the singers seemed to be Italian, and all were backed by swollen string arrangements. Whenever a favorite song came on, she’d crank up the volume, subjecting us to countless versions of “Volare” and “That’s Amore.”

Radio meant a lot to Helen, but only her station. When I was invited to record a series of commentaries for NPR, she took no interest whatsoever. The morning my first story was broadcast, she pounded on our door. I was in the bedroom with a pillow over my head, so Hugh answered, and gestured to the air around him. “Listen,” he whispered. “David is on the radio.”

“So what?” Helen said. “A lot of people are on the radio.” Then she handed him an envelope and asked if we’d mail in her stool sample. “It’s not the whole thing, just a smear,” she told him. When the broadcast was over and I finally got out of bed, I noticed that she’d posted her stool sample with Christmas stamps and included the spidery handwritten message “Happy Holidays.”

Our building was full of people who, for one reason or another, had found their way onto Helen’s shit list. Some were doomed right from the start: she didn’t like their looks or the sounds of their voices. They were stuck up. They were foreign. Our landlord had a small office just off Bleecker Street, and Helen used to call him at least three times a day. She was like the secret police, always watching, always taking notes.

Then the landlord died, and the building was sold to a real estate conglomerate located somewhere in New Jersey. The new owners didn’t care that the woman on the second floor had found a black boyfriend, or that the super was composing electronic music instead of improving his English. Overnight Helen became powerless, and those who had lived in fear of her grew progressively more defiant. You’d think she would hate being called a tattletale or, even worse, “a nosy old bitch,” but, strangely, such names seemed only to invigorate her.

“You think I can’t kick your ass?” I’d hear her yell. “Ya mutt, I’ll mop the fucking floor with you.”

The first few times I heard this, I laughed. Then it was me she was threatening to mop the floor with, and it suddenly didn’t seem so funny. This was another of those arguments that came out of nowhere: a word here, a word there, and the next thing I knew we were at each other’s throats. Ironically, the fight started over a blown fuse. My electricity had gone out, and I needed a key to the basement. Helen had one, and when she refused to loan it to me, I told her she was being an asshole.

“That’s better than being a drunk,” she said, and she waited a moment for the word to settle in. “That’s right. You think I don’t see you with the empty cans and bottles every morning. You think I can’t see it in your swollen face?”

Had I not been so loaded that I could barely stand, my denial might have carried a bit more weight. As it was, I sounded pathetic. “You don’ know. Anything about . . . what. Goes on with. Me.”

We were in her doorway when she put her hands on my chest and pushed. “You think you’re tough? You think I can’t kick your ass?”

Hugh came up the stairs just then, his ears ringing from all the noise. “You’re like children, the both of you,” he told us.

Following our little scene, Helen and I didn’t talk for a month. I’d hear her in the hall sometimes, most often in the morning, giving food to Joe. “It’s my Famous Pasta Fagioli, and that one next door, the Greek bastard, would die if he knew I was giving it to you.”

It was a stranger who brought us back together. In the ten or so years before she retired, Helen cleaned house for a group of priests in Murray Hill. “They were Jesuits,” she told me. “That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting.”

In her opinion, a person who hired a housekeeper was a person who thought himself better than everyone else. She loved a story in which a snob got his comeuppance, but the people I worked for were generally pretty thoughtful. I felt like a bore, telling her how unobtrusive and generous everyone was, and so it came as a pleasant surprise when I was sent to clean an apartment near the Museum of Modern Art. The woman who lived there was in her late sixties and had hair the color of a newly hatched chick. Mrs. Oakley, I’ll say her name was. She wore a denim skirt with a matching blouse and had knotted a red bandana around her throat. With some people this might be it, their look, but on her it seemed like a costume, like she was going to a party with a cattle-rustling theme.

Most often a homeowner would take my jacket, or direct me toward the closet. Mrs. Oakley did neither, and when I made for the brass rack that she herself clearly used, she said, “Not there,” her voice a bark. “You can put your things in the guest bathroom. Not on the countertop, but on the toilet.” She pointed to a door at one end of the foyer. “Put the lid down first,” she told me. “Then put your coat and scarf on top of the lid.”

I wondered who would be stupid enough not to have understood that, and I imagined a simpleton with a puzzled expression on his face. “Hey,” he might say. “How come my jacket’s all wet? And while we’re at it, who put this turd in my pocket?!”

“Something amuses you, does it?” Mrs. Oakley asked.

I said, “No. Not at all.” Then I jotted down the time in my portable notebook.

She saw me writing and put her hands on her hips. “I am not paying you to practice your English,” she told me.

“Excuse me?”

She pointed to my notebook. “This is not a language institute. You are here to work, not to learn new words.”

“But I’m an American,” I told her. “I spoke English before I got here. Like at home, growing up and stuff.”

Mrs. Oakley sniffed but did not apologize. I think she wanted a foreigner so badly that she heard an accent where there was none. How else to explain it? Being a desperate, godforsaken immigrant, it went without saying that I coveted everything before me: the white wall-to-wall carpet, the framed reproduction of Renoir’s Brat with Watering Can, the gold-plated towel rack in the marble master bathroom.

“I have very nice things,” she announced. “And I expect to still have them after you’ve left.”

Was this the moment I decided to make up with Helen, or was it later, when Mrs. Oakley screamed at me for opening the medicine cabinet? “When I told you to clean the master bathroom, I meant everything but that. What are you, an idiot?”

At the end of the day I caught the subway home. Helen was staring down from her window as I approached our building, and when I waved at her, she waved back. Three minutes later I was sitting at her kitchen table. “So then she told me, ‘I have very nice things and I expect to still have them after you’ve left.’”

“Oh, she was asking for it, that one,” Helen said. “What did she say when you slapped her?”

“I didn’t slap her.”

She looked disappointed. “OK, then, what did you break on your way out?”

“Nothing. I mean, I didn’t walk out.”

“Are you telling me you stayed and took that shit?”

“Well . . . sure.”

“Then what the fuck?” She lit a fresh cigarette and tucked her disposable lighter back into her pack. “What the fuck are you good for?”

The first time I went to Normandy I stayed for three weeks. After returning, I went straight to Helen’s, but she refused to hear about it. “The French are faggots,” she said. As evidence, she brought up Bernard, who was born in Nice and lived on the fourth floor.

“Bernard’s not a homosexual,” I told her.

“Maybe not, but he’s filthy. Did you ever see his apartment?”

“No.”

“OK then, so shut up.” This was her way of saying that the argument was over and that she had won. “I bet you’re glad to be back, though. You couldn’t pay me to go overseas. I like it where’s it’s civilized and you can drink the water without running to the terlet every five minutes.”

While in France, I’d bought Helen some presents, nothing big or expensive, just little things a person could use and then throw away. I placed the bag of gifts on her kitchen table and she halfheartedly pawed through it, holding the objects upside down and sideways, the way a monkey might. A miniature roll of paper towels, disposable napkins with H’s printed on them, kitchen sponges tailored to fit the shape of the hand: “I don’t have any use for this crap,” she said. “Take it away. I don’t want it.”

I put the gifts back into the bag, ashamed at how deeply my feelings were hurt. “Most people, most humans, receive a present and say thank you,” I told her.

“Not when they get garbage like that, they don’t,” she said.

In fact these things were perfect for her, but Helen wouldn’t accept them for the same reason she wouldn’t accept anything: the other person had to owe and be beholden. Forever.

I picked up the bag and headed for the door. “You know what you have?” I said. “You have a gift disorder.”

“A what?”

“It’s like an eating disorder, only with presents.”

“Take that back,” she said.

“My point exactly.” And then I left, slamming the door behind me.

Helen knocked on January 1, just as I was leaving for a cleaning job. “Work on New Year’s Day, and you’ll work every day of the year,” she told me. “It’s the truth. You can ask anybody.”

I wondered for a moment if she was right, and then I considered the last little truism she had passed my way: you won’t get a hangover if you sleep with the TV on. She also claimed you could prevent crib death by making the sign of the cross three times with a steak knife.

“If you’re camping, could you use a Swiss Army knife instead?” I asked.

She looked at me and shook her head. “Who the fuck goes camping with a baby?”

Helen was shaking out her pills: the ones for her heart and her high blood pressure, the pain in her side and the new one in her right leg. Trips to the doctor were her only ticket out of the apartment, and after each visit she’d spend hours on the phone, haranguing the people at Medicare. When that got old, she’d phone McKay’s drugstore and have a go at the pharmacist. “I’d like to cut his balls off and stuff them down his throat,” she told me.

Now there were new pills she needed to take. I offered to pick them up for her, and along with the prescription she handed me a receipt. It seemed her enemy at McKay’s had overcharged her for her last order, so after getting this new one I was to tell the hook-nosed Jew bastard that he owed my neighbor four cents. I was then to suggest that he shove his delivery charge up his fat ass.

“Got that?” Helen asked.

I was happy to pick up the medicine, but when it came to the disputed bill — and toward the end there was always a dispute — I’d make it up out of my own pocket and lie when she prodded me for details. “The pharmacist said he was very sorry and that it won’t happen again,” I’d tell her.

“Did you tell him what he can do with his delivery charge?”

“I sure did.”

“And what did he say?”

“Pardon?”

“When you told him to shove it up his ass, what did he say?”

“He said, um, ‘I bet that’s going to hurt.’”

“You’re damn right it will,” she’d say.

Back when she could still get up and down the stairs, Helen had all the run-ins she could handle: on the bus, at the post office, wherever peace reigned, she shattered it. Now she had to import her prey, deliverymen, most of them. The ones from the Grand Union, the supermarket we favored, tended to be African, recent immigrants from Chad and Ghana. “You black bastards,” I’d hear her yell. “You think I don’t know what you’re up to?”

She hit bottom when she physically attacked a deaf-mute. This was a boy of fourteen, a beloved neighborhood figure who delivered for the nearby deli. “How could you?” Hugh scolded.

“What do you expect me to do when somebody’s stealing my things?” she asked. “What, am I just supposed to stand there and do nothing?” It eventually came out that by “stealing” she meant that he had borrowed her pen. After using it to tally the bill, he stuck it in his shirt pocket, absentmindedly, most likely. Helen reacted by pulling his hair and digging her nails into his neck. “But not hard,” she said. “There was barely any blood at all.”

When asked why the boy would steal a thirty-cent pen, a pen he could surely get for free at his father’s store, Helen sighed, exhausted at having to explain the obvious. “He’s Portuguese,” she said. “You know what those bastards are like. You’ve seen them.” But there was a hint of desperation in her voice, the fear that maybe this time she had gone too far.

The following morning she called our apartment and asked, almost sheepishly, if I’d rub in some Tiger Balm for her. I crossed the hall and, after letting me in, she took a seat and pointed out her sore shoulder. “I think I sprained it smacking that little freak,” she said.

It was February 14, Valentine’s Day, and after a few more words about the delivery boy, Helen’s thoughts turned to love, or, more specifically, to my father. He’d visited me the previous autumn, and she’d been talking about him ever since. “That Lou is a very good-looking man. Too bad you didn’t get any of his genes.”

“Well, I’m sure I got some of them,” I told her.

“No, you didn’t. You must take after your mother. And she’s dead, right?”

“Yes, she’s dead.”

“You know we’re the same age, me and Lou. Is he dating anybody?”

The thought of my father and Helen together made the bottoms of my feet sweat. “No, he’s not dating anyone, and he’s not going to, either.”

“No need to get so sensitive,” she said. “Jesus, I was only asking.” And then she lowered her shirt a little and asked me to do her back.

I’d just returned from another trip to the pharmacy when Helen asked me to dab some white shoe polish on her kitchen ceiling. A slight stain had formed, and she insisted that it was dog urine, leaking down from the apartment above her. “The sons of bitches, they think that if they ruin my ceiling, it’ll drive me into a nursing home.”

I don’t remember why I didn’t do it. Maybe I had someone waiting for me, or perhaps I’d just had enough for one day. “I’ll do it tomorrow,” I told her, and as I shut the door, I heard her say, “Right. You and your ‘tomorrows.’”

It was Joe who found her. Helen kept a sawed-off two-by-four in her kitchen, a weapon against possible intruders, and he awoke to hear her banging it against the inside of her door. He had a key in case of emergency and entered the apartment to find her on the floor. Beside her was the overturned step stool, and beneath the kitchen table, lying just out of reach, was the bottle of white shoe polish.

On One Life to Live, and all soap operas, really, the characters are forever blaming themselves. The male lead is nearly killed in a car accident, and as the surgeons do what they can to save him, the family gathers in the waiting room to accept responsibility. “It was my fault,” the ex-wife says. “I never should have upset him with the news about the baby.” She starts to bang her head against the wall and is stopped by the lead’s father. “Don’t be stupid. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.” Then the girlfriend horns in and decides that it was all her fault. In the end, the only one who won’t feel guilty is the driver of the other car.

“Why the heck would she stand on a chair to polish her shoes?” Joe asked as the ambulance headed off toward St. Vincent’s. “That’s what I can’t figure out.”

“Me neither,” I said.

During the next few months Hugh and I visited Helen in the hospital. The problem wasn’t her broken hip, but the series of strokes that followed her operation. It was as if she had been struck by lightning, that’s how fried and out of it she was. Unable to put a sentence together, she’d also been literally defanged. No teeth, no glasses, and when the last of the henna had faded, her hair, like her face, was the color of old cement.

The hospital room was small and hot. Near the door was a second bed, and in it lay a Dominican woman who had recently lost a leg. Each time I was there, she pointed to Helen’s food tray and begged. “Is she going to eat that applesauce? Do you think she wants those crackers? If not, I’ll take them.”

Had Helen been her old self, this woman would have been missing a lot more than a leg. As it was, the roommate left no more of an impression than the wall-mounted TV, which was permanently tuned to the Bullshit station, and was on all the time.

At the funeral home were people I had heard about but never met. Helen once told me that as a young woman her nickname had been Rocky, as in Graziano, the fighter, but according to her sister, she was called any number of things. “To me she was always Baby Hippo, on account of her great big behind,” she told me. “I’d call her that and, oh, she used to get so mad.”

Most everyone I met had a good anger story: Helen cursing, Helen smacking, Helen slamming down the phone. In the months after she died, these were the moments I’d recall as well. Gradually, though, the focus shifted, and instead of Helen attacking a deaf-mute, I’d picture her the following morning, sitting in her kitchen as I applied the Tiger Balm. It was such a strange thing for her to have, let alone say. “It’s Oriental,” she told me. “I think the Chinese invented it.”

I am not a terribly physical person. Helen wasn’t either. We’d never hugged or even shaken hands, so it was odd to find myself rubbing her bare shoulder and then her back. It was, I thought, like stroking some sort of a sea creature, the flesh slick and fatty beneath my palms. In my memory, there was something on the stove, a cauldron of tomato gravy, and the smell of it mixed with the camphor of the Tiger Balm. The windows were steamed, Tony Bennett was on the radio, and saying, “Please,” her voice catching on the newness of the word, Helen asked me to turn it up.

The Monster Mash

The thing about dead people is that they look really dead, fake almost, like models made of wax. This I learned at the medical examiner’s office I visited in the fall of 1997. While the bodies seemed unreal, the tools used to pick them apart were disturbingly familiar. It might be different in places with better funding, but here the pathologists used hedge clippers to snip through rib cages. Chest cavities were emptied of blood with cheap metal soup ladles, the kind you’d see in cafeterias, and the autopsy tables were lubricated with whatever dish detergent happened to be on sale. Also familiar were the songs, oldies mainly, that issued from the blood-spattered radio and formed a kind of sound track. When I was young, I associated Three Dog Night with my seventh-grade shop teacher, who proudly identified himself as the group’s biggest fan. Now, though, whenever I hear “Joy to the World,” I think of a fibroid tumor positioned upon a Styrofoam plate. Funny how that happens.

While at the medical examiner’s office, I dressed in a protective suit, complete with a bonnet and a pair of Tyvek booties. Citizens were disemboweled, one right after another, and on the surface I’m sure I seemed fine with it. Then at night I’d return to my hotel, double-lock the door, and stand under the shower until all the soap and shampoo were used up. The people in the next room must have wondered what was going on. An hour of running water, and then this blubbery voice: “I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do.”

It’s not as if I’d walked into this completely unprepared. Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I’d dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people’s pets. “Igor,” they called me. “Wicked, spooky.” But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project, the good kind that doesn’t involve homework. Most kids grow out of it, but the passing of time only heightened my curiosity.

As a young man, I saved up my dishwashing money and bought a seventy-five-dollar copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death, a sort of bible for forensic pathologists. It shows what you might look like if you bit an extension cord while standing in a shallow pool of water, if you were crushed by a tractor, struck by lightning, strangled with a spiral or nonspiral telephone cord, hit with a claw hammer, burned, shot, drowned, stabbed, or feasted upon by wild or domestic animals. The captions read like really great poem titles, my favorite being “Extensive Mildew on the Face of a Recluse.” I stared at that picture for hours on end, hoping it might inspire me, but I know nothing about poetry, and the best I came up with was pretty lame:

Behold the recluse looking pensive!

Mildew, though, is quite extensive

On his head, both aft and fore.

He maybe shoulda got out more.

I know nothing about biology either. The pathologists tried to educate me, but I was too distracted by the grotesque: my discovery, for instance, that if you jump from a tall building and land on your back, your eyes will pop out of your head and hang by bloody cables. “Like those joke glasses!” I said to the chief medical examiner. The man was nothing if not professional, and his response to my observations was always the same: “Well.” He’d sigh. “Not really.”

After a week in the autopsy suite, I still couldn’t open a Denny’s menu without wanting to throw up. At night I’d close my eyes and see the buckets of withered hands stored in the office’s secondary cooler. The cooler contained brains too, a whole wall of them shelved like preserves in a general store. Then there were the bits and pieces: a forsaken torso, a pretty blond scalp, a pair of eyes floating in a baby food jar. Put them all together, and you had an incredibly bright secretary who could type like the wind but never answer the telephone. I’d lie awake thinking of things like this, but then my mind would return to the freshly dead, who were most often whole, or at least whole-ish.

Most of the them were delivered naked, zipped up in identical body bags. Family members were not allowed inside the building, and so the corpses had no context. Unconnected to the living, they were like these strange creatures, related only to one another. A police report would explain that Mrs. Daniels had been killed when a truck lost control and drove through the front window of a hamburger stand, where she had been waiting in line for her order. But that was it in terms of a narrative. Did the victim have children? Was there a Mr. Daniels? How was it that she found herself at this particular hamburger stand on this particular afternoon? In cases like hers, I needed more than a standard report. There had to be a reason this woman was run down, as, without one, the same thing might happen to me. Three men are shot to death while attending a child’s christening, and you tell yourself, Sure. They were hanging out with the wrong crowd. But buying a hamburger? I buy hamburgers. Or I used to, anyway.

This medical examiner’s office was in the western United States, in a city where guns are readily available and drivers are known to shoot each other over parking spaces. The building was low-slung and mean-looking, set on the far edge of the downtown area, between the railroad tracks and a rubber stamp manufacturer. In the lobby was a potted plant and a receptionist who kept a can of Mountain Glen air freshener in her desk drawer. “For decomps,” she explained, meaning those who had died alone and rotted awhile before being found. We had such a case on Halloween, an eighty-year-old man who had tumbled from a ladder while replacing a lightbulb. Four and a half days on the floor of his un-air-conditioned home, and as the bag was unzipped the room filled with what the attending pathologist termed “the smell of job security.” The autopsy took place in the morning and was the best argument for the buddy system I had ever seen. Never live alone, I told myself. Before you change a lightbulb, call someone from the other room and have him watch until you are finished.

By this point in my stay, my list of don’ts covered three pages and included such reminders as: never fall asleep in a Dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off your air supply while masturbating. This last one is a nationwide epidemic, and it’s surprising the number of men who do it while dressed in their wife’s clothing, most often while she is out of town. To anyone with similar inclinations, a word of warning: after you’re discovered, the police will take snapshots of your dead, costumed body, which will then be slid into photo albums and pored over by people like me, who can’t take the stench of an incoming decomp, so hole themselves up in the records room, moaning, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” not sure if they’re referring to your plum-colored face or to the squash blossom necklace you’ve chosen to go with that blouse.

I hadn’t timed my visit to coincide with Halloween, but that’s the way it worked out. You’d think that most of the casualties would involve children, trick-or-treaters hit by cars or done in by tainted candy, but actually the day was just like any other. In the morning we had our decomposed senior, and after lunch I accompanied a female pathologist to a murder trial. She had performed the victim’s autopsy and was testifying on behalf of the prosecution. There were plenty of things that should have concerned me — the blood-spatter evidence, the trajectory of the bullets — but all I could concentrate on was the defendant’s mother, who’d come to court wearing cutoff jeans and a Ghostbusters T-shirt. It couldn’t have been easy for her, but still you had to wonder: what would she consider a dress-up occasion?

After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. “Fire up the kettle,” I told him. “Ol’-fashioned skull boil at five p.m.”

It was, of course, the fear talking, that and a pathetic desire to appear casual, one of the gang. That evening, instead of returning to my hotel, I sat around with the transporters, one of whom had recently been ticketed for using the car pool lane and had argued, unsuccessfully, that the dead body he was carrying in the back constituted a second passenger. I’d thought these guys would be morose and scary-looking, the type who live in basements and have no social skills, but they were actually just the opposite. Several of them had worked for undertakers, and told me that gypsy funerals were the worst. “They set up in the parking lot, tap into the electricity, and grill chicken until, like, forever.” They recalled finding the eye of a suicide victim stuck to the bottom of a bedroom door, and then they turned on the TV and started watching a horror movie, which I can’t believe had any real effect on them.

It was just the four of us until around midnight, when a tipsy man in a Daytona Beach sweatshirt came to the front gate and asked for a tour. When the transporters refused him, he gestured toward an idling car and got his girlfriend to ask. The young woman was lovely and flirtatious, and as she pressed herself against the gate I imagined her lying upon an autopsy table, her organs piled in a glistening heap beside her. I now looked at everyone this way, and it worried me that I’d never be able to stop. This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable. The trick-or-treater may not be struck down on Halloween, but sooner or later he is going to get it, as am I, and everyone I have ever cared about.

It goes without saying that for the next few weeks I was not much fun to live with. In early November, I returned home and repelled every single person I came into contact with. Gradually, though, my gloominess wore off. By Thanksgiving I was imagining people naked rather than dead and naked, which was an improvement. A week later, I was back to smoking in bed, and, just as I thought that I’d put it all behind me, I went to my neighborhood grocery store and saw an elderly woman slip on a grape. She fell hard, and after running to her side I took her by the arm. “You really have to watch yourself in this produce aisle.”

“I know it,” she said. “I could have broken my leg.”

“Actually,” I told her, “you could have been killed.”

The woman attempted to stand, but I wouldn’t let her. “I’m serious. People die this way. I’ve seen it.”

Her expression changed then, becoming fearful rather than merely pained. It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

In the Waiting Room

Six months after moving to Paris, I gave up on French school and decided to take the easy way out. All I ever said was “Could you repeat that?” And for what? I rarely understood things the second time around, and when I did it was usually something banal, the speaker wondering how I felt about toast, or telling me that the store would close in twenty minutes. All that work for something that didn’t really matter, and so I began saying “D’accord,” which translates to “I am in agreement,” and means, basically, “OK.” The word was a key to a magic door, and every time I said it I felt the thrill of possibility.

“D’accord,” I told the concierge, and the next thing I knew I was sewing the eye onto a stuffed animal belonging to her granddaughter. “D’accord,” I said to the dentist, and she sent me to a periodontist, who took some X-rays and called me into his conference room for a little talk. “D’accord,” I said, and a week later I returned to his office, where he sliced my gums from top to bottom and scraped great deposits of plaque from the roots of my teeth. If I’d had any idea that this was going to happen, I’d never have said d’accord to my French publisher, who’d scheduled me the following evening for a television appearance. It was a weekly cultural program, and very popular. I followed the pop star Robbie Williams, and as the producer settled me into my chair I ran my tongue over my stitches. It was like having a mouthful of spiders — spooky, but it gave me something to talk about on TV, and for that I was grateful.

I said d’accord to a waiter and received a pig’s nose standing erect on a bed of tender greens. I said it to a woman in a department store and walked away drenched in cologne. Every day was an adventure.

When I got a kidney stone, I took the Métro to a hospital and said “D’accord” to a cheerful redheaded nurse, who led me to a private room and hooked me up to a Demerol drip. That was undoubtedly the best that d’accord got me, and it was followed by the worst. After the stone had passed, I spoke to a doctor, who filled out an appointment card and told me to return the following Monday, when we would do whatever it was I’d just agreed to. “D’accord,” I said, and then I supersized it with “génial,” which means “great!”

On the day of my appointment, I returned to the hospital, where I signed the register and was led by a slightly less cheerful nurse to a large dressing room. “Strip to your underwear,” she told me, and I said, “D’accord.” As the woman turned to leave, she said something else, and, looking back, I really should have asked her to repeat it, to draw a picture if that’s what it took, because once you take your pants off, d’accord isn’t really OK anymore.

There were three doors in the dressing room, and after removing my clothes I put my ear against each one, trying to determine which was the safest for someone in my condition. The first was loud, with lots of ringing telephones, so that was out. The second didn’t sound much different, and so I chose the third and entered a brightly painted waiting room set with plastic chairs and a glass-topped coffee table stacked high with magazines. A potted plant stood in the corner, and beside it was a second door, which was open and led into a hallway.

I took a seat and had been there for a minute or so when a couple came in and filled two of the unoccupied chairs. The first thing I noticed was that they were fully dressed, and nicely, too — no sneakers or sweat suits for them. The woman wore a nubby gray skirt that fell to her knees and matched the fabric of her husband’s sport coat. Their black hair, which was obviously dyed, formed another match, but looked better on her than it did on him — less vain, I supposed.

“Bonjour,” I said, and it occurred to me that possibly the nurse had mentioned something about a robe, perhaps the one that had been hanging in the dressing room. I wanted more than anything to go back and get it, but if I did the couple would see my mistake. They’d think I was stupid, so to prove them wrong I decided to remain where I was and pretend that everything was normal. La la la.

It’s funny the things that run through your mind when you’re sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers. Suicide comes up, but just as you embrace it as a viable option you remember that you don’t have the proper tools: no belt to wrap around your neck, no pen to drive through your nose or ear and up into your brain. I thought briefly of swallowing my watch, but there was no guarantee I’d choke on it. It’s embarrassing, but, given the way I normally eat, it would probably go down fairly easily, strap and all. A clock might be a challenge, but a Timex the size of a fifty-cent piece — no problem.

The man with the dyed black hair pulled a pair of glasses from his jacket pocket, and as he unfolded them I recalled a summer evening in my parents’ backyard. This was ages ago, a dinner for my sister Gretchen’s tenth birthday. My f-ather grilled steaks. My mother set the picnic table with insect-repelling candles, and just as we started to eat she caught me chewing a hunk of beef the size of a coin purse. Gorging always set her off, but on this occasion it bothered her more than usual.

“I hope you choke to death,” she said.

I was twelve years old, and paused, thinking, Did I hear her correctly?

“That’s right, piggy, suffocate.”

In that moment, I hoped that I would choke to death. The knot of beef would lodge itself in my throat, and for the rest of her life my mother would feel haunted and responsible. Every time she passed a steak house or browsed the meat counter of a grocery store, she would think of me and reflect upon what she had said, the words “hope” and “death” in the same sentence. But, of course, I hadn’t choked. Instead, I had lived and grown to adulthood, so that I could sit in this waiting room dressed in nothing but my underpants. La la la.

It was around this time that two more people entered. The woman looked to be in her midfifties, and accompanied an elderly man who was, if anything, overdressed: a suit, a sweater, a scarf, and an overcoat, which he removed with great difficulty, every button a challenge. Give it to me, I thought. Over here. But he was deaf to my telepathy and handed his coat to the woman, who folded it over the back of her chair. Our eyes met for a moment — hers widening as they moved from my face to my chest — and then she picked a magazine off the table and handed it to the elderly man, who I now took to be her father. She then selected a magazine of her own, and as she turned the pages I allowed myself to relax a little. She was just a woman reading a copy of Paris Match, and I was just the person sitting across from her. True, I had no clothes on, but maybe she wouldn’t dwell on that, maybe none of these people would. The old man, the couple with their matching hair: “How was the hospital?” their friends might ask, and they’d answer, “Fine,” or “Oh, you know, the same.”

“Did you see anything fucked-up?”

“No, not that I can think of.”

It sometimes helps to remind myself that not everyone is like me. Not everyone writes things down in a notebook and then transcribes them into a diary. Fewer still will take that diary, clean it up a bit, and read it in front of an audience:

“March 14. Paris. Went with Dad to the hospital, where we sat across from a man in his underpants. They were briefs, not boxers, a little on the gray side, the elastic slack from too many washings. I later said to Father, ‘Other people have to use those chairs, too, you know,’ and he agreed that it was unsanitary.

“Odd little guy, creepy. Hair on his shoulders. Big idiot smile plastered on his face, just sitting there, mumbling to himself.”

How conceited I am to think I might be remembered, especially in a busy hospital where human misery is a matter of course. If any of these people did keep a diary, their day’s entry would likely have to do with a diagnosis, some piece of news either inconvenient, or life-altering: the liver’s not a match, the cancer has spread to the spinal column. Compared with that, a man in his underpants is no more remarkable than a dust-covered plant, or the magazine subscription card lying on the floor beside the table. Then, too, good news or bad, these people would eventually leave the hospital and return to the street, where any number of things might wipe me from their memory.

Perhaps on their way home they’ll see a dog with a wooden leg, which I saw myself one afternoon. It was a German shepherd, and his prosthesis looked as though it had been fashioned from a billy club. The network of straps holding the thing in place was a real eye-opener, but stranger still was the noise it made against the floor of the subway car, a dull thud that managed to sound both plaintive and forceful at the same time. Then there was the dog’s owner, who looked at the homemade leg and then at me, with an expression reading, Not bad, huh?

Or maybe they’ll run into something comparatively small yet no less astonishing. I was walking to the bus stop one morning and came upon a well-dressed woman lying on the sidewalk in front of an office-supply store. A small crowd had formed, and just as I joined it a fire truck pulled up. In America, if someone dropped to the ground, you’d call an ambulance, but in France it’s the firemen who do most of the rescuing. There were four of them, and, after checking to see that the woman was OK, one of them returned to the truck and opened the door. I thought he was looking for an aluminum blanket, the type they use for people in shock, but instead he pulled out a goblet. Anywhere else it would have been a cup, made of paper or plastic, but this was glass and had a stem. I guess they carry it around in the front seat, next to the axes or whatever.

The fireman filled the goblet with bottled water, and then he handed it to the woman, who was sitting up now and running her hand over her hair, the way one might when waking from a nap. It was the lead story in my diary that night, but no matter how hard I fiddled with it I felt that something was missing. Had I mentioned that it was autumn? Did the leaves on the sidewalk contribute to my sense of utter delight, or was it just the goblet and the dignity it bespoke: “Yes, you may be on the ground; yes, this drink may be your last — but let’s do it right, shall we?”

Everyone has his own standards, but in my opinion a sight like that is at least fifty times better than what I was providing. A goblet will keep you going for years, while a man in his underpants is good for maybe two days, a week at the most. Unless, of course, you are the man in his underpants, in which case it will probably stay with you for the rest of your life — not floating on the exact edge of your consciousness, not handy like a phone number, but still within easy reach, like a mouthful of steak, or a dog with a wooden leg. How often you’ll think of the cold plastic chair, and of the nurse’s face as she passes the room and discovers you with your hands between your knees. Such surprise, such amusement, as she proposes some new adventure, then stands there, waiting for your “d’accord.”

Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle

On the flight to Raleigh, I sneezed, and the cough drop I’d been sucking on shot from my mouth, ricocheted off my folded tray table, and landed, as I remember it, on the lap of the woman beside me, who was asleep and had her arms folded across her chest. I’m surprised the force didn’t wake her — that’s how hard it hit — but all she did was flutter her eyelids and let out a tiny sigh, the kind you might hear from a baby.

Under normal circumstances, I’d have had three choices, the first being to do nothing. The woman would wake in her own time and notice what looked like a shiny new button sewn to the crotch of her jeans. This was a small plane, with one seat per row on aisle A, and two seats per row on aisle B. We were on B, so should she go searching for answers I would be the first person on her list. “Is this yours?” she’d ask, and I’d look dumbly into her lap.

“Is what mine?”

Option number two was to reach over and pluck it from her pants, and number three was to wake her up and turn the tables, saying, “I’m sorry, but I think you have something that belongs to me.” Then she’d hand the lozenge back and maybe even apologize, confused into thinking that she’d somehow stolen it.

These circumstances, however, were not normal, as before she’d fallen asleep the woman and I had had a fight. I’d known her for only an hour, yet I felt her hatred just as strongly as I felt the stream of cold air blowing into my face — this after she’d repositioned the nozzle above her head, a final fuck-you before settling down for her nap.

The odd thing was that she hadn’t looked like trouble. I’d stood behind her while boarding and she was just this woman, forty at most, wearing a T-shirt and cutoff jeans. Her hair was brown and fell to her shoulders, and as we waited she gathered it into a ponytail and fastened it with an elastic band. There was a man beside her who was around the same age and was also wearing shorts, though his were hemmed. He was skimming through a golf magazine, and I guessed correctly that the two of them were embarking on a vacation. While on the gangway, the woman mentioned a rental car and wondered if the beach cottage was far from a grocery store. She was clearly looking forward to her trip, and I found myself hoping that, whichever beach they were going to, the grocery store wouldn’t be too far away. It was just one of those things that go through your mind. Best of luck, I thought.

Once on board, I realized that the woman and I would be sitting next to each other, which was fine. I took my place on the aisle, and within a minute she excused herself and walked a few rows up to talk to the man with the golf magazine. He was at the front of the cabin, in a single bulkhead seat, and I recall feeling sorry for him, because I hate the bulkhead. Tall people covet it, but I prefer as little leg room as possible. When I’m on a plane or in a movie theater, I like to slouch down as low as I can and rest my knees on the seat back in front of me. In the bulkhead, there is no seat in front of you, just a wall a good three feet away, and I never know what to do with my legs. Another drawback is that you have to put all of your belongings in the overhead compartment, and these are usually full by the time I board. All in all, I’d rather hang from one of the wheels than have to sit up front.

When our departure was announced, the woman returned to her seat but hovered a half foot off the cushion so she could continue her conversation with the man she’d been talking to earlier. I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying, but I believe I heard him refer to her as Becky, a wholesome name that matched her contagious, almost childlike enthusiasm.

The plane took off, and everything was as it should have been until the woman touched my arm and pointed to the man she’d been talking to. “Hey,” she said, “see that guy up there?” Then she called out his name — Eric, I think — and the man turned and waved. “That’s my husband, see, and I’m wondering if you could maybe swap seats so that me and him can sit together.”

“Well, actually —,” I said, and, before I could finish, her face hardened, and she interrupted me, saying, “What? You have a problem with that?”

“Well,” I said, “ordinarily I’d be happy to move, but he’s in the bulkhead, and I just hate that seat.”

“He’s in the what?”

“The bulkhead,” I explained. “That’s what you call that front row.”

“Listen,” she said, “I’m not asking you to switch because it’s a bad seat. I’m asking you to switch because we’re married.” She pointed to her wedding ring, and when I leaned in closer to get a better look at it she drew back her hand, saying, “Oh, never mind. Just forget it.”

It was as if she had slammed a door in my face, and quite unfairly it seemed to me. I should have left well enough alone, but instead I tried to reason with her. “It’s only a ninety-minute flight,” I said, suggesting that in the great scheme of things it wasn’t that long to be separated from your husband. “I mean, what, is he going to prison the moment we land in Raleigh?”

“No, he’s not going to prison,” she said, and on the last word she lifted her voice, mocking me.

“Look,” I told her, “if he was a child I’d do it.” And she cut me off, saying, “Whatever.” Then she rolled her eyes and glared out the window.

The woman had decided that I was a hard-ass, one of those guys who refuse under any circumstances to do anyone a favor. But it’s not true. I just prefer that the favor be my idea, and that it leaves me feeling kind rather than bullied and uncomfortable. So no. Let her sulk, I decided.

Eric had stopped waving, and signaled for me to get Becky’s attention. “My wife,” he mouthed. “Get my wife.”

There was no way out, and so I tapped the woman on the shoulder.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, all dramatic, as if I had thrown a punch.

“Your husband wants you.”

“Well, that doesn’t give you the right to touch me.” Becky unbuckled her seat belt, raised herself off the cushion, and spoke to Eric in a loud stage whisper: “I asked him to swap seats, but he won’t do it.”

He cocked his head, sign language for “How come?” and she said, much louder than she needed to, “’Cause he’s an asshole, that’s why.”

An elderly woman in aisle A turned to look at me, and I pulled a Times crossword puzzle from the bag beneath my seat. That always makes you look reasonable, especially on a Saturday, when the words are long and the clues are exceptionally tough. The problem is that you have to concentrate, and all I could think of was this Becky person.

Seventeen across: a fifteen-letter word for enlightenment. “I am not an asshole,” I wrote, and it fit.

Five down: six-letter Indian tribe. “You are.”

Look at the smart man, breezing through the puzzle, I imagined everyone thinking. He must be a genius. That’s why he wouldn’t swap seats for that poor married woman. He knows something we don’t.

It’s pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I’ll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I’ll wave it in someone’s face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I’m smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don’t have a life.

As I turned to my puzzle, Becky reached for a paperback novel, the kind with an embossed cover. I strained to see what the title was, and she jerked it closer to the window. Strange how that happens, how you can feel someone’s eyes on your book or magazine as surely as you can feel a touch. It only works for the written word, though. I stared at her feet for a good five minutes, and she never jerked those away. After our fight, she’d removed her sneakers, and I saw that her toenails were painted white and that each one was perfectly sculpted.

Eighteen across: “Not impressed.”

Eleven down: “Whore.”

I wasn’t even looking at the clues anymore.

When the drink cart came, we fought through the flight attendant.

“What can I offer you folks?” she asked, and Becky threw down her book, saying, “We’re not together.” It killed her that we might be mistaken for a couple, or even friends, for that matter. “I’m traveling with my husband,” she continued. “He’s sitting up there. In the bulkhead.”

You learned that word from me, I thought.

“Well, can I offer —”

“I’ll have a Coke,” Becky said. “Not much ice.”

I was thirsty, too, but more than a drink I wanted the flight attendant to like me. And who would you prefer, the finicky baby who cuts you off and gets all specific about her ice cubes, or the thoughtful, nondemanding gentleman who smiles up from his difficult puzzle, saying, “Nothing for me, thank you”?

Were the plane to lose altitude and the only way to stay aloft was to push one person out the emergency exit, I now felt certain that the flight attendant would select Becky rather than me. I pictured her clinging to the doorframe, her hair blown so hard it was starting to fall out. “But my husband —,” she’d cry. Then I would step forward, saying, “Hey, I’ve been to Raleigh before. Take me instead.” Becky would see that I am not the asshole she mistook me for, and in that instant she would lose her grip and be sucked into space.

Two down: “Take that!”

It’s always so satisfying when you can twist someone’s hatred into guilt — make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns. The problem is that it works both ways. I’d taken this woman as the type who arrives late at a movie, then asks me to move behind the tallest person in the theater so that she and her husband can sit together. Everyone has to suffer just because she’s sleeping with someone. But what if I was wrong? I pictured her in a dimly lit room, trembling before a portfolio of glowing X-rays. “I give you two weeks at the most,” the doctor says. “Why don’t you get your toenails done, buy yourself a nice pair of cutoffs, and spend some quality time with your husband. I hear the beaches of North Carolina are pretty this time of year.”

I looked at her then, and thought, No. If she’d had so much as a stomachache, she would have mentioned it. Or would she? I kept telling myself that I was within my rights, but I knew it wasn’t working when I turned back to my puzzle and started listing the various reasons why I was not an asshole.

Forty across: “I give money to p —”

Forty-six down: “— ublic radio.”

While groping for Reason number two, I noticed that Becky was not making a list of her own. She was the one who called me a name, who went out of her way to stir up trouble, but it didn’t seem to bother her in the least. After finishing her Coke, she folded up the tray table, summoned the flight attendant to take her empty can, and settled back for a nap. It was shortly afterward that I put the throat lozenge in my mouth, and shortly after that that I sneezed, and it shot like a bullet onto the crotch of her shorts.

Nine across: “Fuck!”

Thirteen down: “Now what?”

It was then that another option occurred to me. You know, I thought. Maybe I will swap places with her husband. But I’d waited too long, and now he was asleep as well. My only way out was to nudge this woman awake and make the same offer I sometimes make to Hugh. We’ll be arguing, and I’ll stop in midsentence and ask if we can just start over. “I’ll go outside and when I come back in we’ll just pretend this never happened, OK?”

If the fight is huge, he’ll wait until I’m in the hall, then bolt the door behind me, but if it’s minor he’ll go along, and I’ll reenter the apartment, saying, “What are you doing home?” Or “Gee, it smells good in here. What’s cooking?” — an easy question as he’s always got something on the stove.

For a while, it feels goofy, but eventually the self-consciousness wears off, and we ease into the roles of two decent people, trapped in a rather dull play. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You can set the table if you want.”

“All-righty, then!”

I don’t know how many times I’ve set the table in the middle of the afternoon, long before we sit down to eat. But the play would be all the duller without action, and I don’t want to do anything really hard, like paint a room. I’m just so grateful that he goes along with it. Other people’s lives can be full of screaming and flying plates, but I prefer that my own remains as civil as possible, even if it means faking it every once in a while.

I’d gladly have started over with Becky, but something told me she wouldn’t go for it. Even asleep, she broadcast her hostility, each gentle snore sounding like an accusation. Ass-hole. Ass-ho-ole. The landing announcement failed to wake her, and when the flight attendant asked her to fasten her seat belt she did it in a drowse, without looking. The lozenge disappeared beneath the buckle, and this bought me an extra ten minutes, time spent gathering my things, so that I could make for the door the moment we arrived at our gate. I just didn’t count on the man in front of me being a little bit quicker and holding me up as he wrestled his duffel bag from the overhead bin. Had it not been for him, I might have been gone by the time Becky unfastened her seat belt, but as it was I was only four rows away, standing, it turned out, right beside the bulkhead.

The name she called me was nothing I hadn’t heard before, and nothing that I won’t hear again, probably. Eight letters, and the clue might read, “Above the shoulders, he’s nothing but crap.” Of course, they’d don’t put words like that in the Times crossword puzzle. If they did, anyone could finish it.

Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool

Before it was moved out near the fairground, the North Carolina Museum of Art was located in downtown Raleigh, and often, when we were young, my sister Gretchen and I would cut out of church and spend an hour looking at the paintings. The collection was not magnificent, but it was enough to give you a general overview, and to remind you that you pretty much sucked. Both Gretchen and I thought of ourselves as artists. She the kind that could actually draw and paint, and me the kind that pretended I could actually draw and paint. When my sister looked at a picture, she would stand at a distance, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, drift forward, until her nose was right up against the canvas. She examined all of the painting, and then parts of it, her fingers dabbing in sympathy as she studied the brushstrokes.

“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.

And she said, “Oh, you know, the composition, the surfaces, the way things look realistic when you’re far away but weird when you’re up close.”

“Me too,” I said, but what I was really thinking was how grand it would be to own a legitimate piece of art and display it in my bedroom. Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard. This made them look more presentable.

I was looking for framing ideas one afternoon when I wandered into a little art gallery called the Little Art Gallery. It was a relatively new place, located in the North Hills Mall and owned by a woman named Ruth, who was about my mom’s age, and introduced me to the word “fabulous,” as in: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a fabulous new Matisse that just came in yesterday.”

This was a poster rather than a painting, but still I regarded it the way I thought a connoisseur might, removing my glasses and sucking on the stem as I tilted my head. “I’m just not sure how it will fit in with the rest of my collection,” I said, meaning my Gustav Klimt calendar and the cover of the King Crimson LP tacked above my dresser.

Ruth treated me as an adult, which must have been a task, given the way I carried on. “I don’t know if you realize it,” I once told her, “but it seems that Picasso is actually Spanish.”

“Is he?” she said.

“I had a few of his postcards on my French wall, the one where my desk is, but now I’ve moved them next to my bed, beside the Miró.”

She closed her eyes, pretending to imagine this new configuration. “Good move,” she said.

The Little Art Gallery was not far from my junior high, and I used to stop by after class and hang out. Hours later I’d return home, and when my mother asked where I had been, I’d say, “Oh, at my dealer’s.”

In 1970, the only artwork in my parents’ house was a family tree and an unframed charcoal portrait of my brother, my four sisters, and me done by a guy at a street fair. Both hung in the dining room, and I thought they were pretty good until I started spending time with Ruth and decided that they weren’t challenging enough.

“What more do you want from a group picture of six spoiled children?” my mother asked, and rather than trying to explain I took her to see Ruth. I knew that the two of them would get along. I just didn’t think they would get along so well. At first the topic of conversation was me — Ruth doing the cheerleading and Mom just sort of agreeing. “Oh, yes,” she said. “His bedroom is lovely. Everything in its place.”

Then my mother started hanging out at the gallery as well, and began buying things. Her first purchase was an elongated statue of a man made from what looked like twisted paper but was actually metal pressed into thin sheets. He stood maybe two feet tall and held three rusted wires, each attached to a blown-glass balloon that floated above his head. Mr. Balloon Man, she called it.

“I’m just not certain he needs that top hat,” I told her.

And my mother said, “Oh, really?” in a way that meant: If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.

It bothered me that she’d bought something without seeking my advice, and so I continued to offer my thoughtful criticism, hoping it might teach her a lesson.

Her next piece was a grandfather clock with a body made of walnut and a human face pounded from what appeared to be a Chinese gong. The face wasn’t realistic but what my mother called “semiabstract,” a word she had picked up from Ruth. A word that was supposed to be mine. I didn’t know exactly how much the clock had cost, but I knew it was expensive. She called it Mr. Creech, in honor of the artist, and when I tried to explain that art was not a pet you gave a little name to, she told me she could call it whatever the hell she wanted to.

“Should I put Mr. Creech next to Mr. Balloon Man, or does that make the dining room too busy?”

“Don’t ask me,” I told her. “You’re the expert.”

Then my father was introduced to Ruth, and he became an expert as well. Art brought my parents together in a way that nothing else had, and because their interest was new they were able to share it without being competitive. Suddenly they were a team, the Walter and Louise Arensberg of Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Your mother’s got a real eye,” my father boasted — this in regard to Cracked Man, a semiabstract face made by the same potter who had crafted our new coffee table. Dad wasn’t in the habit of throwing money around, but this, he explained, was an investment, something that, like stocks and bonds, would steadily appreciate in value, ultimately going “right through the roof.”

“And in the meantime, we all get to enjoy it,” my mother said. “All of us except Mr. Crabby,” by which she meant me.

The allure of art had always been that my parents knew nothing about it. It had been a private interest, something between me and Gretchen. Now, though, everyone was in on it. Even my Greek grandmother had an opinion, that being that unless Jesus was in the picture it wasn’t worth looking at. Yiayia was not discriminating — a Giotto or a Rouault, it made no difference so long as the subject was either nailed to a cross or raising his arms before a multitude. She liked her art to tell a story, and, though that particular story didn’t interest me, I liked the same thing. It’s why I preferred the museum’s Market Scene on a Quay to its Kenneth Noland. When it came to making art, however, I tended toward the Noland, as measuring out triangles was a lot easier than painting a realistic-looking haddock.

Before my parents started hanging out at the gallery, they thought I was a trailblazer. Now they saw me for what I was: not just a copycat, but a lazy one. Looking at my square of green imposed atop a pumpkin-colored background, my father stepped back, saying, “That’s just like what’s-his-name, that guy who lives on the Outer Banks.”

“Actually, it’s more like Ellsworth Kelly,” I said.

“Well, he must have gotten his ideas from the guy on the Outer Banks.”

At the age of fifteen, I was maybe not the expert I made myself out to be, but I did own a copy of The History of Art and knew that eastern North Carolina was no hotbed of artistic expression. I was also fairly certain that no serious painter would devote half the canvas to his signature, or stick an exclamation point at the end of his name.

“That shows what you know,” my mother said. “Art isn’t about following the rules. It’s about breaking them. Right, Lou?”

And my father said, “You got it.”

The next thing they bought was a portrait done by a man I’ll call Bradlington.

“He’s an alcoholic,” my mother announced, this as if his drinking somehow made him more authentic.

With the exception of my grandmother, everyone liked the Bradlington, especially me. It brought to mind a few of the Goyas I’d seen in my art history book — the paintings he did toward the end, when the faces were just sort of slashed on. “It’s very moody,” I pronounced. “Very . . . invoc-ative.”

A few months later, they bought another Bradlington, a portrait of a boy lying on his back in a ditch. “He’s stargazing,” my mother said, but to me the eyes seemed blank, like a dead person’s. I thought my parents were on a roll, and was disappointed when, instead of buying a third Bradlington, they came home with an Edna Hibel. This was a lithograph rather than a painting, and it pictured a young woman collecting flowers in a basket. The yellow of the blossoms matched the new wallpaper in the breakfast nook, and so it was hung above the table. The idea of matching artwork to decor was, to me, an abomination, but anything that resulted in new stuff was just fine by my mother. She bought a sofa the salesman referred to as “the Navajo,” and then she bought a piece of pottery that complemented the pattern of the upholstery. It was a vase that stood four feet high and was used to hold the dried sea oats that matched the frame of an adjacent landscape.

My mother’s sister, Joyce, saw a photo of our new living room and explained that the American Indians were a lot more than sofa cushions. “Do you have any idea how those people live?” she asked. Joyce did charity work with the tribes in New Mexico, and, through her, my mother learned about desperate poverty and kachina dolls.

My father preferred the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and began collecting masks, which smirked and glowered from the wall above the staircase. I’d hoped that the Indian stuff might lead my parents to weed out some of their earlier choices, but no such luck. “I can’t get rid of Mr. Creech,” my mother said. “He hasn’t appreciated yet.”

I was in my second year of college by then and was just starting to realize that the names my parents so casually tossed around were not nationally known and never would be. Mention Bradlington to your Kent State art history teacher, and she’d take the pencil out of her mouth and say, “Who?”

“He’s an alcoholic? Lives in North Carolina?”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of him.”

As for the others, the Edna Hibels and Stephen Whites, they were the sort whose work was advertised in ARTnews rather than Artforum, their paintings and lithographs “proudly shown” alongside wind chimes at places with names like the Screeching Gull, or Desert Sunsets, galleries almost always located in a vacation spot. I tried pointing this out to my parents, but they wouldn’t listen. Maybe today my art history teacher drew a blank on Bradlington, but after his liver gave out she’d sure as hell know who he was. “That’s the way it works sometimes,” my father said. “The artist is only appreciated after he’s dead. Look at Van Gogh!”

“So will every artist be appreciated after his death?” I asked. “If I’m hit by a bus tomorrow afternoon, will the painting I did last week be worth a fortune?”

“In a word, no,” my father said. “I mean, it’s not enough to just be dead. You’ve got to have some talent. Bradlington’s got it out the ass, and so does Hibel. The gal who made the coffee table is going to last for an eternity, but as for you, I wouldn’t bank on it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

My father settled down on the Navajo. “It means that your artwork doesn’t look like art.”

“And you’re the expert on that?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

“Well, you can just go to hell,” I told him.

I’d never have admitted it, but I knew exactly what my father was talking about. At its best, my art looked like homework. This was to be expected with painting and drawing — things requiring actual skill — but even my later conceptual pieces were unconvincing. The airmail envelope full of toenail clippings, the model of the Lincoln Memorial made of fudge — in someone else’s hands, such objects might provoke discussion, but in my own they seemed only desperate and pretentious. Not just homework but bad homework.

I quit making homework when I turned thirty, and I started collecting paintings some ten years later, shortly after moving to Europe. A few of my canvases are French or English, portraits mainly, dating from the 1800s, but the ones I most care about are Dutch, and were done in the seventeenth century. Monkey Eating Peaches, Man Fleeing a Burning Village, Figures Tormented by Devils in Hell — how can you go wrong with such straightforward titles? The artists are minor — sons, most often, of infinitely more talented fathers — but if I say their names with a certain authority I can almost always provoke a response. (“Did you say Van der Pol? Oh, right, I think I saw something of his at the Louvre.”)

People hush up when they stand before my paintings. They clasp their hands behind their backs and lean forward, wondering, most likely, how much I paid. I want to tell them that each cost less than the average person spends on car insurance, that and general upkeep — oil changes and break pads and such. I, myself, don’t have a car, so why not take that money and put it toward something I like? Then, too, the paintings will appreciate, maybe not a lot, but given time I can surely get my money back, so in a way I’m just guarding them. Explaining, though, would ruin the illusion that I am wealthy and tasteful. A connoisseur. A collector.

The sham falls apart only when I’m visited by a real collector, or, even worse, by my father, who came in the winter of 2006 and spent a week questioning my judgment. One of my paintings shows a group of cats playing musical instruments. It sounds hokey on paper — cute, even — but in real life it’s pleasantly revolting, the musicians looking more like monsters than anything you’d keep as a pet. I have it in my living room, and, after asking the price, my father shook his head the way you might when witnessing an accident. “Boy,” he said. “They sure saw you coming.”

Whether I’m buying a painting or a bedspread, his premise is always the same — namely, that I am retarded, and people take advantage of me.

“Why would something that’s survived three hundred years not cost that much?” I asked, but he’d moved to another evident eyesore, this one Dutch, showing a man undergoing a painful and primitive foot surgery. “I wouldn’t spend two minutes looking at this one,” he told me.

“That’s OK,” I said.

“Even if I were in prison, and this was the only thing on my wall, I wouldn’t waste my time with it. I’d look at my feet or at my mattress or whatever, but not this, no way.”

I tried my best not to sound too hopeful. “Is someone sending you to prison?”

“No,” he said. “But whoever sold this to you should be there. I don’t know what you paid, but if it was more than ten dollars I think you could probably sue the guy for fraud.” He looked it over one last time and then rubbed his eyes as if they’d been gassed. “God Almighty. What were you thinking?”

“If art is a matter of personal taste, why are you being so aggressive?” I asked.

“Because your taste stinks,” he told me. This led him to reflect upon Cracked Man, which still hangs in the foyer beside his living room. “It’s three slabs of clay cemented to a board, and not a day goes by when I don’t sit down and look at that thing,” he said. “I don’t mean glancing, but full-fledged staring. Contemplating, if you catch my drift.”

“I do,” I said.

He then described the piece to Hugh, who had just returned from the grocery store. “It was done by a gal named Proctor. I’m sure you’ve heard of her.”

“Actually, no,” Hugh said.

My father repeated the name in his normal tone of voice. Then he began yelling it, and Hugh interrupted, saying, “Oh, right. I think I’ve read something about her.”

“You’re damn right you have,” my father said.

Before they started collecting art, my parents bought some pretty great things, the best being a concrete lawn ornament they picked up in the early 1960s. It’s a toadstool, maybe three feet tall, with a red spotted cap and a benevolent little troll relaxing at its base. My father placed it just beyond the patio in our backyard, and what struck my sisters and me then, and still does, is the troll’s expression of complete acceptance. Others might cry or get bent out of shape when their personal tastes are denounced and ridiculed, but not him. Icicles hang off his beard, slugs cleave to the tops of his pointed shoes: “Oh, well,” he seems to say. “These things happen.”

Even when we reached our teens and developed a sense of irony, it never occurred to us to think of the troll as tacky. No one ever stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth, or disgraced him with sexual organs, the way we did with Mr. Balloon Man or my mother’s kitchen witch. One by one, my sisters and I left home, and the backyard became a dumping ground. Snakes nested beneath broken bicycles and piles of unused building supplies, but on return visits we would each screw up our courage and step onto the patio for an audience with Mr. Toadstool. “You and that lawn ornament,” my mom would say. “Honest to God, you’d think you’d been raised in a trailer.”

Standing in her living room, surrounded by her art collection, our mother frequently warned us that death brought out the worst in people. “You kids might think you’re close, but just wait until your father and I are gone, and you’re left to divide up our property. Then you’ll see what savages you really are.”

My sisters and I had always imagined that when the time came we would calmly move through the house, putting our names on this or that. Lisa would get the dessert plates; Amy, the mixer; and so on, without dissent. It was distressing, then, to discover that the one thing we all want is that toadstool. It’s a symbol of the people our parents used to be, and, more than anything in the house itself, it looks like art to us.

When my father dies, I envision a mad dash through the front door, past the Hibel and the Bradlingtons, past Cracked Man and Mr. Balloon Man, and into Indian territory, where we’ll push one another down the stairs, six connoisseurs, all with gray hair, charging toward a concrete toadstool.