Imagine Me Gone

Michael

HAROLD J. BUTTERWORTHY, MD (psychiatry)

PhD (neuroscience), MPhil (geology)

MFA (metallurgy), BFA (dance)

BA (algebra)^*

Patient Intake

Name: Michael

Date of Birth: January

Primary Care Physician: Mass General

Current Therapist: Walter Benjamin

Therapist’s Phone: No longer in service

What are the problem(s) you are seeking help for?

1. Fear

2. Trembling

3. Individualism

4. White supremacy

*

board certified

What are your treatment goals?

1. Ordinary unhappiness

2. Racial justice

Current Symptoms:

Yes

Personal Medical History:

Yes

Family Medical History:

Let’s not pretend either of us has time for a complete answer here. In brief, Dad didn’t make it; Mom’s never taken a pill in her life; Alec had an ulcer early on, when they were still fashionable, but has since transitioned into the back-pain industry; and I’d guestimate Celia’s chronic fatigue peaked out around ’94 somewhere in the Bay Area, though she still has Persistent Annual Lupus Scare Syndrome (PALSS) and Cryptogenic Abdominal Rash Syndrome (CARS). As for my grandparents, all four suffered from Eventual Death Syndrome (EDS).

Have you ever been hospitalized for nonpsychiatric care or surgery?

On Christmas Eve 1992, I came down with a self-diagnosis of esophageal cancer requiring what amounted to an overnight stay in the decongestant aisle of a twenty-four-hour CVS in Medford.

Please briefly describe your educational background:

The usual grade-school misery. Though a boy named Ralph eventually befriended me over Star Trek and the music I played him. Funkadelic’s “America Eats Its Young,” for instance. When I heard George Clinton ask, Who would sacrifice the great grandsons and daughters of her jealous mother by sucking their brain until their ability to think was amputated by pimping their instincts until they were fat, horny, and strung-out in her neurotic attempt to be queen of the universe? Who is this bitch? (read: America), it struck me that our fifth-grade curriculum was somehow incomplete. I thereafter spent every nickel of my allowance on funk. This being 1978, there was a lot to catch up on: Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron, everything by James Brown. I listened to records in every spare hour, including while I did my homework, and on my headset after I’d “gone to bed.” I couldn’t be certain what it meant to “Give Up the Funk” or “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” or why Parliament would title an album Mothership Connection. But I had my first secret joy at knowing that beyond the veil of the apparent, meaning ached in the grain of music. A joy accompanied by my first intuition that black people might know a thing or two about the need for that meaning — history being the culprit. The only affective correlative of such history I had thus far experienced being the queasy feeling I’d get in my stomach watching my grandmother show extra politeness to black people on the rare occasions she encountered them, in order to make very clear that she was not affiliated with those terrible, other white people who hated and mistreated them, success being when a black person smiled back at her, acknowledging her politeness and her goodness, thus completing the blameless circle of liberalism.

As for high school, moving overseas and returning less than three years later didn’t much help. Nor the premonition I had that second autumn we were back in Massachusetts, in the woods where my father later disposed of himself. My family has an unfortunate habit of taking walks: my father by upbringing, my mother by faith in the medicinal quality of fresh air, Celia because of an idiopathic athletic streak, and Alec, as ever, in affectation, dolled up like some child earl, all tweed and Wellingtons. My mother was the one who nettled me into compliance, nagging me to abandon my station at the turntable and accompany, on that particular day, Celia and my father on a walk with the deracinator, who scurried off her leash like a giant swamp rat in heat. It was a Sunday afternoon in November (don’t ask me for a nature description; there were trees, a path, etc.). We got to some kind of clearing. I was bored and hoped we would turn around soon. The fornicator had vanished down a landscape feature. Celia had gone after her. My father sat on a fallen tree. A general pause set in.

The horror was brief, a few seconds. Flayed bodies swarmed in front of me in a bloody, contorted mass. I looked up and away trying to evade the menace, but it was pressing down from above, filling the circle, thriving on its own gore. Years later, when I came across the paintings of Francis Bacon, and saw those innards turned outward but still alive, it struck me that the man understood. As in his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, with those mouths agape at the end of nearly human limbs, testifying not to physical suffering but the bleeding of the mind. At the time, however, I just went cold, my mouth dry as chalk. And I knew evil was seeded in that place, waiting to bloom.

I don’t particularly believe in a spiritual world, other than music. I’m a materialist to the bone. But I had the overwhelming sense of needing to escape whatever it was that dwelt there. I hoofed it home like a ghost from its enchanter fleeing. I couldn’t sleep that night or the next. I watched my father and Celia for signs that they had sensed it too, but they behaved as if nothing had happened.

For months, I’d been pleading to be allowed to go back to England to finish my schooling with my friends. Now I had no choice. I had to get away. I stopped asking about it and just called my friend Simon, who said I could live at his house, and then I told my mother and father I would be leaving after Christmas. To my surprise, they no longer protested. In fact, they seemed relieved. I realized their previous resistance had had nothing to do with me. They just didn’t have the organizational wherewithal to cope with my demand. As soon as I lifted that burden from them, they folded like a cheap umbrella. And so I left them there, my family, without ever warning them, without ever telling them what I’d seen. Left them to face it on their own. An act for which I’ve never been able to forgive myself.

To go and live with Simon and his family in a damp stone house back in Oxfordshire, just up the road from Fairford Air Base. I was given a spare bedroom overlooking a paved courtyard. The return to the States had put me behind on my A levels. On Saturdays, Simon and I went record shopping in Oxford, but otherwise we mostly slept, went to class, and studied. I found no pleasure in speed-reading Thackeray, but there you have it. I had to fly through those ballroom scenes on jet skis.

It wasn’t until spring that I went to get my hair cut in the village and met Angie. She worked in a little salon next to the greengrocer, just two chairs, a wall of mirrors, and a waiting bench, with a sink at the back and photos of soft-punk hair models in the window, like head shots for the Human League. The day I went she was the only stylist there. We had the place to ourselves. As soon as she put on Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and began singing along with it, I knew we had things to discuss. That track may have started as a monster gay-club hit, but Angie sang it as though it were a personal anthem, nothing camp about it. She was beautiful. Right away. A slight, African-American woman between the hopelessly sophisticated ages of twenty-five and I don’t know what, with freckles under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. She had three earrings in each lobe and a metallic blue bandanna wrapped around a cascade of Jheri curls. I asked question after question, and she answered them freely, her hands cupping my head, tilting it this way and that as she clipped. She’d grown up and gone to school in Cleveland. That’s where she’d met her husband, who was a jet mechanic at the air base. They’d been stationed in Turkey, then Germany, and now Fairford. This was the first place she’d been able to get a job of her own, which was a good thing too, she said, because her husband was in the habit of cheating on her with what she called “native women,” and she’d asked him for a divorce.

Was it the Sister Sledge / New Order mix tape that I brought her on my second visit that transformed me in her eyes from a client into a living subjectivity? Maybe. All I know is she didn’t complain about my returning every three or four days to get my bangs trimmed, with ever deeper and more challenging compilations in hand. She didn’t know Kraftwerk, or for that matter any German industrial music. It was when I suggested she give Einstürzende Neubauten a whirl that she said, “You’re cute.” That evening, Simon insisted she must have meant it in the diminutive sense, as you would speak to a child, not a prospective lover. But he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen her smile.

When I dropped another cassette off the next day, I enclosed a note asking if she would go on a date with me. I suggested we go to Oxford, imagining she might feel awkward being seen with me by the locals. I envisioned us holding hands on the night bus back to Carterton, perhaps with her head resting on my shoulder. I would absorb all her suffering, leaving her weightless, and free to love me. We had never touched, and yet she had already voided all of my worries but one: when I would see her next.

After forty-eight hours, she still hadn’t called. Desperate, I tried to make another appointment, but her colleague said she was booked up and couldn’t see me. That night, after the salon closed, I slipped another tape through the mail slot, this one starting with Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” along with a note apologizing for being too forward, saying I understood she might need time, given that her divorce wasn’t final. It was three days later, on a Saturday evening, that Simon and I saw her at the pub. She was with one of the other girls from the salon. I could tell she was trying to ignore me. But after she’d had a few drinks she relented, nodding hello from their table in the corner. Simon told me that I was crazy, that she was an older woman, and still married. Simon had a girlfriend, and they seemed to like each other, but I could tell from hanging out with them that he didn’t feel for her what I felt for Angie. They enjoyed each other, but they were still individuals. Their love hadn’t obliterated the quotidian; it hadn’t rid them of their workaday selves. That’s what Angie and I were capable of. She and her friend didn’t protest when I dragged Simon over to sit with them. They made us buy them drinks. Angie was tipsy but not drunk, and she didn’t move her leg aside when I touched it lightly with mine (of such miracles, strung endlessly together, true happiness is made). We talked about the deathly boredom of the Cotswolds and how Simon and I were going to move to London. When the publican barked last call, her friend said she hadn’t realized how late it was, and had to dash. Simon wisely did the same. Which left the two of us. She was taking the bus back to the base, she said. I asked if she would let me walk her to her stop. The thin fluorescent light that filtered through the scratched plastic siding of the bus shelter wasn’t strong enough to reveal her expression as we stood there watching the drizzle wet the pavement. And so it was with extreme trepidation, braced for rebuff, that I put a hand on her shoulder and leaned down to kiss her gently on the lips. But she closed her eyes and let it happen. After a moment she even put her hand to my arm, giving me the passing sense that I had a physical body.

Whatever psychic bandwidth I had for A levels vanished. I could think only of our future. I had curated my mix tapes for her with great care, but now they took whole afternoons. I needed to keep impressing her with my taste but demonstrate at the same time how much emotional experience we already shared. Those tapes were the line of flight out of the trap of language. Through the incision of music we could know and love each other much, much faster.

Each time I went by the salon to give her my latest cassette, she would thank me, take it quickly, and tell me she had a customer and couldn’t chat. I’d go every evening to the pub, risking the ire of Simon’s parents, and stay until closing, power-reading The Mill on the Floss by fake candlelight, waiting for her to appear. And on the nights that she did, she and her friend would sit with me again, kidding me about my exams, drinking more than I ever could, and Angie would let me walk her to the bus stop, and if no one was around, I got to kiss her, and sometimes hug her, too.

And yet to my consternation, she refused to let me take her on a full-on date. She kept using her husband as an excuse. But contained in each refusal, by the implication of her tone, was the one acknowledgment that counted: sooner or later we would see each other again.

I don’t know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven’t contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they’re just kidding. A hope that undoes what tiny pride you have, and makes you thankful for the undoing, so long as it promises another hour with the person who is now the world. Maybe people mean attractiveness, or affection, or pleasantness, or security. Like the nonbelievers in church who enjoy the hymns or go for the sense of community, but avert their eyes from the cross. I feel sorry for them. They are dead before their time.

As it happened, I didn’t do so well on my exams. Angie’s husband attempted to reconcile with her the week they started. I pleaded with her to go with me on the bus to Oxford, just for a single afternoon, and finally she relented. The day before my Modern History A level, I took her to the Debenhams on Magdalen Street. I had seen a fitted silk shirt in a catalog that Simon’s sister got in the mail, and I wanted to buy it for her, but she was crying intermittently and didn’t want any gifts. If you go back to your husband, nothing will change, I told her. He’ll keep you close for a while, and then cheat again. He wants to retain you for your physical beauty, but anyone can appreciate that. We’re on the threshold of something much greater. I may have confused her when I said our worlds could end as soon as we joined, but I meant only our life-worlds as separate subjectivities, not a material end. She told me I read too many novels, and led us out of Women’s Tops back onto the sidewalk.

Though it was expensive, I had made a reservation for tea at Browns. But I could see now that this was completely wrong and stuffy, and that what we needed was alcohol. The pub we ended up in turned out to be full of university students, shouting at each other over the blare of Depeche Mode’s “Shake the Disease.” I got us drinks. After half a pint she seemed calmer. Which is when she said it was time she cleared something up. She thanked me for being kind to her over the last few weeks, but said that I had gotten the wrong idea. She shouldn’t have kissed me, she said. It had been a mistake. It wasn’t my fault, she added, she had let it happen. At which point, she reached into her bag and handed me back all my cassettes.

In retrospect, I suppose the cruelty of the gesture may have been her attempt to cauterize the wound as she inflicted it. I only knew that she was delivering me into purgatory, between the irrevocable hope of being with her and the death of life without her.

It was the next morning that Simon’s mother woke me early to say I had a phone call. I went down to the kitchen in my pajamas and stretched the phone cord over to the Aga to warm myself. It was Peter Lorian, my father’s oldest friend, calling to say my father was dead. I asked where they had found him. He said in the woods. I was to meet him at Heathrow the next morning. He’d made reservations for the two of us to fly to Boston. He said he was terribly sorry, and that I would need to take care of my mother now. We hung up, and I went back upstairs to sleep another forty-five minutes before it was time to come down for breakfast. When I told Simon and his family the news, they looked appalled.

I was at the doorstep of the salon no later than nine thirty. It was an hour before one of Angie’s colleagues eventually appeared to open the shop and told me I had better buzz off.

Have you ever had an EKG?

Alas, no.

How many caffeinated beverages do you drink a day?

What I have always found most comforting about these forms is the trace of hope I get as I’m filling them out. How they break your life down into such tidy realms, making each seem tractable, because discrete, in a way they never are beyond the white noise of the waiting room. You get that fleeting sense that you’re on the verge of being understood, truly and fully, and for the first time, if you could just get it all down in black and white before the receptionist calls your name.

Please briefly describe your work history:

My first legit employment began in the fall of 1985, after Dad, when I moved to London with Simon, as we’d planned. Z80 machine code was much in demand at the time, and I happened to have picked it up as a youth. I got a programming job at a small firm stocked with early video-game fiends who spent their off-hours disassembling Ataris. Later, during my various periods of under- or unemployment, my mother would say, Why not go back to computers? You were so good at them. But she hadn’t experienced the conditions I was working under, conditions I knew would be the same wherever I went: the stupefying lack of humor, the wretched taste in music, and all that unforgivable clothing.

Of this last item, I should say, it wasn’t just my colleagues’ ignorance of peg-legged jeans or the use of eye shadow in club dress. Trends come and go. These boyos were ignorant of the entire canon of twentieth-century menswear, of the precepts laid down by masters like Montgomery Clift and the emperor of Japan. Rules as precise as the laws of British prose. You could violate them for effect, but only if you understood them. Which meant seeing how the lines of architectural modernism had been recapitulated in wool and linen, softened only by the heraldic color and pattern of accessories. The members of Joy Division likely weren’t meditating on Frank Lloyd Wright when they took the stage in Manchester but those flat-fronted black cotton trousers and narrow-cut shirts didn’t come from nowhere. Peter Saville, who designed Factory’s records, understood it perfectly well: the iconic weight of black and white balanced against the release of splendor, in this case the dark magnificence of the music itself. Which might describe the tension of Protestant affect more generally: all guardedness and restraint until the eruption of an unextirpated beauty wakes us for a moment from the dream of efficiency.

The point being, my cubicle mates at NextFile couldn’t make it through a London club door to save their lives. I had to make it through those doors because of what was being played on the other side: early Chicago house, or some of the most sublime dance music ever recorded. Frankie Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson, Jesse Saunders — Roland drum-machine royalty. White-rock homophobia may have killed disco on American radio play but the arc of history bends toward justice. They could burn Diana Ross records at a White Sox game, but on the south side of Chicago four-to-the-floor beats rose from the ashes and got stretched onto ten-minute loops by DJs sampling the heaven out of classic disco. The ubiquity of its traces may render it invisible today, but early house had the power of all original art, to reveal the structure of the present: the body on the rack of the electronic, the mind on the rack of the virtual. And it didn’t just lay the structure bare, it gave a body a means to metabolize it, making the new relentlessness as human as dance.

Repurposing historical forces of that size required the power of volume, i.e., a sound system that shook your rib cage, whose subwoofers slapped air to your brow with every beat of the kick drum. Music thick as a hurricane. When the world wants to kill you, sometimes inoculation requires killing little bits of yourself. In this case, your eardrums.

But in London at the time, if you weren’t wearing at least a thread or two by Vivienne Westwood, you couldn’t get past the velvet rope. As Boy George later recalled, a dandy working the door at Taboo off Leicester Square once held a mirror up to a lager lout and said, Would you let yourself in? So I did what was required. I quit NextFile and got a job as a shop assistant at Browns (London clothier, not Oxford restaurant), hawking everything from Katharine Hamnett to Yohji Yamamoto. Chambray shirts to die for. Linen pants cut to break your heart. My sartorial standards may have peaked at nineteen but they peaked high. With the store discount and a kebab diet, I could afford to attire myself well enough to pass through those yearning crowds like Marcel into the salon of the Duchesse de Guermantes. Doormen would pick me from the back of the crowd on my shirts alone. Inside Taboo or Pyramid Night at Heaven, or the less discriminating Delirium, I’d order a beer to have something to hold on to as I stood at the edge of the dance floor. I didn’t know anyone at the center of the scene, where the drugs circulated and the outrageous posed, and I didn’t particularly want to. I just needed to be in the hurricane, in that storm blowing in from paradise, pushing skyward the wreckage of James Brown and George Clinton and the Jamaican dub masters and, yes, Giorgio Moroder and the German industrialists, and all the forgotten producers and DJs who kept the ideas and the vinyl coming, vanishing mediators of a culture considered too throwaway to chronicle. Or perhaps it’s simplest just to say, in the words of Mr. Fingers, intoned in the cadence of King:

In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove.

And from this groove came the groove of all grooves.

And while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldly declared,

“Let there be house!”

and house music was born…

And in every house, you understand, there is a keeper.

And, in this house, the keeper is Jack.

Now some of you might wonder:

Who is Jack, and what is it that Jack does?

Jack is the one who gives you the power to jack your body.

Jack is the one who gives you the power to do the snake.

Jack is the one who gives you the key to the wiggly world.

Or words to that effect. Which might leave you with the impression that I danced. In fact, I never did. After the annihilation of love, I still consider the dance floor the best cure for individualism. But if I’m honest, I can say this only from a certain remove, because I was never able to pick up that key to the wiggly world. The music shook my chest and slapped my face, but I could only sway my head, standing at the edge of the pool, watching the deep end throb. My mother, who finds many things to be a pity, found this a pity. Wouldn’t you enjoy it? she asked, plaintively, hoping as always for the absolution of a remedy. She might as well have asked why I didn’t swim the English Channel. Where my mind goes, my body has never followed.

I didn’t want to leave Britain. Things made sense there for a couple of years, living above the vegetable shop with Simon out in Manor Park with no central heat and the fetid kitchen. I didn’t mind the bus ride to the station past all the depressing little terraced houses with their chintz curtains and grubby hedges, or the overground to Liverpool Street through the blackened warehouses, or the long night buses home after the clubs let out, with the yobs’ vomit streaking under the seats. I was invincibly dressed, after all. Plus, no one asked personal questions. Not even Simon. Mom could send postcards mentioning the upcoming anniversary of my matriculation to nursery school in Battersea, asking if I’d been by the old building, but her wistful calendrics were an ocean away. If it hadn’t been for my shitty exam results I might have gotten into Goldsmiths or Bristol at the beginning of my sojourn, and stayed on. But higher education was a class necessity, and as it happened there were things that I wanted to study. So after putting it off to stay a second year in London, I applied to American colleges. Alas, grade inflation hadn’t reached the UK, and American admissions officers took a dim view of my comprehensive-school Bs. I ended up with six rejections and a job at a bakery in Walcott. After ten months living with my mother and Alec in the house, a time now blessedly voided from my memory, I got off the wait list and into Boston College.

In London, those who didn’t make it past the club doors may not have worn Vivienne Westwood, but most had at least heard of her. They read NME. They read i-D. It was generally understood that music and rigor weren’t unrelated. But not so much at BC. Well-cut linen just didn’t have the same profile. More Led Zeppelin. More Michelob. My work-study job in the rec room drained my serotonin faster than a producer snorts coke. To say nothing of my roommate from Westborough, a “tool” dressed most days in stone-washed jeans and a Guns N’ Roses wifebeater, with whom I was forcibly housed in a sub-brutalist tower sided with gravel. He hadn’t read Celan or Hardy. Death in Venice or Middlemarch. Contemplating his interior life was like staring at a velvet knockoff of an Agnes Martin painting. You needed dental work before long.

What it turned out the place did have, however, was a kick-ass radio station, run chiefly by adult aficionados who had nothing to do with the undergraduate rabble. I managed to talk my way into a weekday two to four a.m. slot. This was at the dawn of techno (at least in Detroit). The listening public, i.e., the dozen or so people who tuned in to my show, needed acclimation to something like Derrick May’s oracular “Strings of Life,” a seven-minute syncopated piano riff looped over a barrage of pop synth and high hats kicking at 128 bpm. Putting this revolution in context required playing songs that most straight musicheads — indulging at that time in the Beastie Boys — considered fey to the hilt, like, say, Ultravox’s “Vienna.” Electronic music has long suffered this prejudice in favor of the four-piece band and the lead singer. As if to break up that nuclear family of rock was to burn the flag. But if we can’t wring spirit from the technical at this late stage, we might as well just donate our bodies to science and get it over with. The machines have to be made to matter. Not on their terms. On ours. They have to be worked back into human longing. And that’s what Atkins, May, Saunderson, and the others were doing. Their pastures weren’t the Lake District or Woodstock but the darkened basements of suburban Michigan.

After a couple of weeks, people began calling the station and asking, What is this stuff? The future, I told them, it’s the future. Listen and be thankful. Not to me, or some genius artist hero, but to the scene producing the sound — the collective witness to life in the shadow of the faded industrial base. Mostly they just wanted to know where they could get their hands on the vinyl so they could start spinning it.

It’s hard to say exactly why I dropped out the fall of my junior year. The architecture obviously wasn’t helping. Nor was my third roommate, a Zionist Patriots fanatic who’d failed to get into Brandeis. The vicious tedium of classes with jocks. A general brownout. Cement in the limbs. I’ve since read about Norwegian reindeer that simply stop moving in winter; they call it arctic resignation. The added blight being that the only place I had to resign to was the house from which I’d fled for the UK in the first place, the house I’d already been forced to retreat to once before. My mother was something of a Norwegian reindeer herself during this period, still trudging back and forth to her job at the Walcott library that she’d begun the winter after my father died. There was a low metabolic rate all around. At least the bakery took me back. I walked there at five most mornings to put the bread and pastry in the ovens. As far as employment history goes, this developed into something of a bright spot. Because I was the first to arrive, I was able to commandeer the kitchen boom box and before long had salvaged several local high school Deadheads. One went so far as to shed his tie-dyes and sweats for pleatless pants and used button-downs. I was at least appreciated.

Because I never told the station manager that I’d dropped out, I was able to keep my radio show, and that January I noticed a schedule change announcing the slot after mine would now feature ska and early dub. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued. What DJ had come forward to fill the only spot deader than my own with grooves that demonstrated such an advanced sense of where dance music on both sides of the Atlantic was headed?

I first saw Caleigh through the glass of the booth. She was hefting a crate of twelve-inches across the lounge dressed in an oversize black turtleneck, baggy purple cords, and black boots, a getup which, properly fitted, wouldn’t have been out of place in London, 1965, or Oakland a decade later, but which on her looked like a thrift-shop effort to obscure how slender she was. She was tall too, nearly six feet, but seemed keen to hide the fact, walking with her shoulders hunched and her head dipped, as though trying to move as invisibly as possible through the room. She wore no makeup or jewelry and had her hair pulled back flat off her high forehead. None of it was enough to disguise her beauty. That she would try apologizing for it only lifted it out of the realm of mere physical chance into a kind of moral grace.

I put on an extra-long final track and came out of the booth to ask if she needed help carrying her records in. She made no response, as if she weren’t the person to ask. I gestured toward one of the crates at her feet; she didn’t protest. The plastic grips were still warm from the touch of her fingers. “I love early dub,” I said. “You can get lost in it.” She nodded, looking straight at me for the first time, for only a split second, her enormous catlike eyes driving stakes through my feet into the carpet like a Roman soldier nailing a thief to a cross. When a half smile lit her face, and she said, “Yeah, I guess you can,” there seemed nothing left but the question of where we would spend the rest of our lives together.

I stayed and listened to every record she played. As I did the following week. She barely spoke between sets, practically whispering her playlist into the mic, using only the recorded PSAs, her demeanor strictly divorced from the frenzied energy of the tracks she spun. Obviously, I had to know more. After that second show I hazarded an invitation for her to join me for an early breakfast. By some miracle she agreed. We ate at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Cleveland Circle. She ordered tea and a plain, and offered the briefest of responses to my questions. Though I did manage to get out of her that she’d gone to high school in Houston, that her father was Nigerian and her mother Sri Lankan, and that (like me) she had no friends at BC. She was, moreover, studying black Anglophone poetry. Maybe when she told me this last fact I shouldn’t have reached quite so quickly into my messenger bag to read her the Audre Lorde quote I’d highlighted the day before—“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need — the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment”—but then I couldn’t help myself. We were meant for each other even more deeply than I had first understood. When I put the book down, she looked at me skeptically, as if I were a cad feigning interest for seduction’s sake. “Why do you read Audre Lorde?” she asked, unconvinced. But when I replied, “Who doesn’t read Audre Lorde?” she laughed for the first time, and I was able to breathe again, knowing this wouldn’t be our last meal.

Should the fact that we bonded that first morning at Dunkin’ Donuts over the work of a radical lesbian feminist have tipped me off that Caleigh would one day date women? You could argue that. But even if I’d known, I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I needed her too fiercely.

One of the troubles with reading Proust while living at home with your mother because you’re too depressed to be in college is that the experience simultaneously aggrandizes and hollows out your fondest hopes for love, leaving you both more expectant and already defeated than most people are into. “One can feel an attraction towards a particular person,” MP allows, which I sure in heaven did for Caleigh, “but to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be — and this is perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace — the risk of an impossibility.” A sweet impossibility to goad the heart higher. Albertine’s lesbianism may be a filigree of Marcel’s imagination, trumped up to fend off boredom and the suspicion he doesn’t actually care for her, but Caleigh’s turned out to be the real, impossible thing.

But all that wasn’t until later. In the beginning, I just organized my life around her as I had organized my life around Angie, though we had so much more to talk about that there wasn’t any question of not seeing each other every day. I arrived at her dorm room midafternoons, after I’d finished my bakery shift and made the trip into Chestnut Hill. If she wasn’t there, I’d write a note on her door and wait for her outside. She’d lead me upstairs without saying much, and we’d start playing records, and I’d read aloud from Gide or Baldwin or Angela Davis as she lay on her bed with a hoodie pulled over her head, rolling her eyes at my oracular tone, chiding me more gently for what I cared about than anyone ever had. Her base state was one of melancholy. She read poetry but ignored her other assignments, sleeping ten to twelve hours a day. I pressed her again and again to reveal every detail of her past to me, but she divulged very little on that score. I had to piece together the internal exile of her high school years, when she was nearly as alienated from the black kids, who saw her as an immigrant freak, as she was from the white kids, who saw her as just black. About her vexed parental relations, she offered little more. All I could make out from stray comments and the occasional overheard phone call was a serious-minded Nigerian businessman who wanted his daughter to study a subject more practical than literature, and a somewhat morose Sri Lankan woman who hadn’t bargained on Texas. The only two subjects she was the least bit voluble on were music and her sense of being inadequate. Whatever portion of our afternoons and evenings that I didn’t monopolize describing how beautiful she was or reading aloud to her, she filled telling me I was just infatuated and that she was clumsy.

But while she insisted on disagreeing with my estimation of her, she wasn’t at all scared of my feelings the way Angie had been. She seemed, instead, to accept them as you might a physical disability. I was allowed to say constantly how much I loved her, and to complain about any delay or skipping of visits. She listened patiently to my descriptions of all that mesmerized me about her, and after protesting that she possessed none of the qualities I ascribed to her, she would reason out with me how I might cope with such a powerful need, as though counseling a friend with romantic troubles. If I had been a testosterone case, I suppose I might have found this condescending, but it struck me instead as deeply kind — for her to bear the debilitation of my love, and even to care for me in the throes of it. I could have talked about nothing else, but occasionally she would put a stop to it by changing the record, and we would both lie back and travel together over the peaks and valleys of those endless dub tracks carved into vinyl by King Tubby and his descendants, the occasional lyric echoing down the trenches of bass so deeply you couldn’t make out the words, only the longing behind them.

As time went on, her generosity toward me extended to hugging. I would sit next to her on her bed and she would put an arm around me and let me rest my cheek on her shoulder. I don’t need reminding how pathetic this seems, to be pitied in this way for what you want and can’t have by the very person you want it from. If I’d managed the tidy, maturational career of a bildungsroman protagonist, I might have suffered all this for a while, and then chucked passion aside for functional reciprocity. But Angie and my early days with Caleigh were no obligatory errors of youth; they were the blueprint. You can diagnose me all you like, and no doubt you will, as Celia and Alec never cease to, pointing out the doomed aspect of obsession, the anxiety it feeds, the supposedly genuine intimacy it precludes. And given my many years of experience in this field I can throw in for free whatever pathology you choose to make of a romantic and sexual attraction to black women by a white man who studies slavery and its legacy in the U.S. But you will come up with nothing that I haven’t thought or worried to death already. Which is one of the reasons I fill these forms out in such detail. The only relief comes in describing it.

That first physical contact with Caleigh, that first hug, wiped out whatever vestigial dignity or restraint I had managed to maintain. I wept. And not a few smiling tears of relief, but open sobbing. And still she held on to me. She said later that she kissed me then not out of pity but because my weeping made her want to kiss me. If she hadn’t already been my best and perhaps only friend, I wouldn’t have believed her, but she’s never dissembled. She doesn’t have the energy for it, and she isn’t trying to get anywhere, so she has no reason to lie or manipulate people. It’s one of the upsides of avoiding ambition.

Thus the answer to the question of a “real date” that had tortured me with Angie came in the vanishing of the question. With Caleigh’s first kiss, that full fount of sorrow opened up: my wretchedness had never been so entirely relieved, even if it returned with a vengeance as soon as our kissing ended. She forgave even my shuddering awkwardness in bed. Being naked with her was terrifying. I couldn’t see how everything I did wasn’t a prelude to rape. My thoughts were unacceptable; my body jerked like a spastic dog; I did everything I could to make sure I wasn’t hurting her and was still certain I was hurting her. It was best when she closed her eyes and I sensed there might be pleasure for her I couldn’t touch or see, some thing or place hidden back inside her where she could go in my presence, if only alone. Then, at least, I didn’t feel purely selfish. It’s so easy to mock the earnestness of men who actually believe in feminism rather than simply pretend to for advantage, as if trying to step beyond a history of violence is a dweeb’s sickly riposte to not getting enough. I wanted to love her, and to be as kind to her as she already was to me. She says she’s never regretted that we had this period together, and I believe her.

There was nothing luxurious about those first months, no panning shots across a clothes-strewn floor leading to the couple naked atop the sheets. Even with as abject a lover as I was, she shied from displaying herself, hurrying instead into the shower when we were done, staying there for long stretches and emerging fully clothed. Her most comforting intimacy was ceasing to use my name and calling me Flipper instead. I had never earned an endearment before, and though its etymology was a mystery to me, I felt chosen each time she used it.

When at the end of the school year she needed a place to stay for the summer, naturally she moved in with me and my mother. She’d absconded with one of the college’s vacuum cleaners and derived some odd comfort from vacuuming our living room rug several times a week. My mother was attracted to the vacuum (unlike ours, it worked), but also wary after Alec, already a college freshman living with Aunt Penny in New York for the summer, characterized it as stolen during a rare home visit. It was the first new appliance to reach the household in years; its shiny yellow casing gave it the appearance of a probe sent from an advanced society to gather data on primitives. Caleigh wanted us to present ourselves to my mother as friends, which should likely have been another tip-off, but it defused awkwardness, so I was all for it. “Your friend likes vacuuming,” my mother would say to me when she got home from work. “She’s been at it again.” Having a guest clean the house might once have offended her sense of propriety, but she didn’t have it in her to make more than a token protest.

Once Caleigh had moved in and I no longer had to worry if I would see her every day, it began to dawn on me that she wasn’t just melancholy, she was about as depressed as I was, if not more so. But again, she didn’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t matter, she kept saying, which was a decent stand-in for her general approach to the world: all obligation was a chore, romance was a fraud, most days hurt, and the only real relief was music. We did read critical race theory articles together, and bemoaned the racial amnesia that hid the decline of black life-worlds behind endless civil rights hagiographies. So that was something. Truth be told, her depression was a comfort, giving me hope we might stay together awhile because there was so much it turned out that I needed to comfort her about.

In August, my mother went away to visit friends and Caleigh and I had that cursed house to ourselves. The month was one long heat wave. My mother didn’t believe in air-conditioning for herself or others, so in my bedroom at night, we’d place a fan a few inches from the mattress and leave it on high. At the bakery, several employees fainted quietly by the ovens. When I got home from work Caleigh and I would sprawl out in the living room, sweating like catfish, distracted even from our own misery, listening to nothing more taxing than ambient house. Celia or Alec would call now and then to check in, and I’d hear about her summer living in Berkeley, or his friends in New York. They’d gotten into colleges with better financial aid, where people drank less Michelob and listened to less Led Zeppelin, and where professors had seminars in their living rooms. I wouldn’t say that I resented them yet because I mostly just worried about how much pain they were in without knowing how to help them. But when they called, it did remind me, as if I needed reminding, that I was living in the house where I had once left them, my younger siblings, to fend for themselves, while they had somehow contrived more permanent escapes.

It would have been appropriate, even natural, I guess, if while I was there I’d dwelt on my father, but I had very few recollections of him and didn’t think about him much at all. This despite the fact that I had been seeing his old psychiatrist, Dr. Gregory, for some time already. I obviously couldn’t afford to pay him, but he’d never lost a patient to suicide before and was apparently guilty enough about it to ignore my nonpayment of his bills. He sent them, I threw them out, and on we went. Celia, asserting her newfound wisdom as a psychology major, said this was clinically unsound, but then she had more resources than I did, and tended toward self-confidence. His office was on the second floor of a small mansion on Marlborough Street in Back Bay. I sat in an upholstered leather chair in the middle of what must once have been a living room, Dr. Gregory’s cherrywood desk placed between two floor-to-ceiling windows with their long sashes and miniature balconies straight out of Edith Wharton, though he didn’t dress half as well as, say, Lawrence Selden in House of Mirth. No suits cut on the bias. No unstructured linen. It’s strange what people do and don’t do with their money. I would never have known he was a Midwesterner or a Methodist, but my mother used to accompany my father to his appointments and she’d gathered this intelligence early on (for her, a visit to a medical professional is first and foremost a social call). I talked to him mostly about psychoanalytic cultural criticism, theories of mass trauma, and occasionally my vicious bouts of panic that Caleigh would leave me imminently for a woman. He was a good listener, Dr. Gregory, and rarely interrupted me.

Perhaps also because of his guilt about my father, he had a quick draw with the prescription pad. This has proved fateful. At some point he introduced the term anxiety disorder into our discussion, and suggested a small dose of Librium, prn. When I told him it didn’t do much more for me than a Benadryl, he wrote me a script for something he described as “slightly more potent.”

I remember my first dose of Klonopin the way I imagine the elect recall their high school summer romances, bathed in the golden light of a perfect carelessness, untouched and untouchable by time’s predations or the foulness of any present pain. As Cat Stevens wrote, The first cut is the deepest, though I’ve always preferred Norma Fraser’s cover to the original (the legendary Studio One, Kingston, Jamaica, 1967). Stevens sings it like a pop song, but Fraser knows the line is true, that she’ll never love like that again. Her voice soars over the reverb like a bird in final flight. The first cut is the deepest. I’ve since learned all about GABA receptors and molecular binding, benzos and the dangers of tolerance, but back then I knew only that I had received an invisible and highly effective surgery to the mind, administered by a pale yellow tablet scored down the middle and no larger than an aspirin. There is so much drivel about psychoactive meds, so much corruption, bad faith, over- and underprescription, vagueness, profiteering, ignorance, and hope, that it’s easy to forget they sometimes work, alleviating real suffering, at least for a time. This was such a time.

I took my first pill as soon as I filled the script at the CVS in Copley, a few blocks from Dr. Gregory’s office. By the time I’d reached Newton Centre on the Green Line, I couldn’t stop smiling. The kind of big, solar smile that suffuses your whole torso, as if your organs are grinning. Soon I began to laugh, at nothing at all, pure laughter, which brought tears to my eyes, no doubt making me appear completely insane to the other passengers. But happier I have rarely been. For that hour and the three or four that followed, I was lifted down off a hook in the back of my skull that I hadn’t even known I’d been hanging from. Here was the world unfettered by dread. Thoughts came, lasted for whole, uninterrupted moments, and then passed away, leaving room for others. The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency. In fact, it seemed almost uneventful. Down the tramcar a gaggle of high schoolers snickered at my lunatic ways and I wasn’t even ashamed. It was as if their derision moved too slowly through this new atmosphere to reach me with any force. I neither envied nor despised them. Who was I? Steve McQueen? When I saw my used Cutlass turning into the parking lot at Woodlawn — Caleigh coming to pick me up — I waved to her sitting behind the wheel. She too looked at me like I was a sociopath. Since when do you wave? she said. Since I found out you could tear down the Berlin Wall with a Q-tip.

Dr. Gregory had told me to take one pill in the morning and one before bed. I slept that night like a baby lamb on sedatives, and woke unafraid. Morning after morning this miracle repeated itself. I began to run experiments. I would summon my worst fears — that I would never get back to school, that I had already ruined my chance to do my larger work, that I was a burden to Caleigh, that she didn’t love me even as a friend but put up with me only because she was depressed and needed company — and I would dwell on each in turn, summoning the images that came along with the fears: being stuck in the house forever, Caleigh living thousands of miles away in love with someone else. And yet, lo and behold it, I couldn’t worry. I imagined this terrible future, I rehearsed the story lines, but my breath wouldn’t tighten, and thoughts moved through me as frictionlessly as a weather report.

I told Caleigh she had to try it, but when I dosed her one morning after breakfast she fell into a six-hour coma, and woke with a hangover, cursing me. Turned out she didn’t have an anxiety disorder. That was the thing about Klonopin: it didn’t just void my anxiety, it diagnosed my state like the X-ray of a fractured bone. The muscles of my face became so relaxed I expected to look in the mirror and see a basset hound. I’d never known a body could be so free of tension and still remain upright.

That fall I went back to school. I read by the hour, wrote papers, sat exams, and initiated my listeners into acid house. Caleigh and I spent all our time together, in our rooms, at the radio station, in the library, I imploring her to enter therapy, she resisting and putting me off, though still allowing me to make love to her. If I had hoped that my guilt about sleeping with her might dwindle with time, I was wrong. It only intensified. It wasn’t just about being a man who might repulse her, or cause her pain. It was being white, and yet free to touch her, to kiss her lips and breasts, to put my finger inside her, when twenty minutes earlier I’d been reading aloud from Andrea Dworkin or Sojourner Truth. This didn’t stop seeming wrong. I tried my best to focus solely on her pleasure, to ignore myself entirely in deference to her. But the political isn’t so easily banished. Yes, I wanted to abdicate myself, to give up my own person, because why else be in love if you can’t leave yourself in the dust? But it was more particular than that. Soon my deference had morphed into something more loaded: the desire to physically reverse racial privilege by becoming her slave. Where else could this transposition occur with any real force but in the trauma of sex?

One night in bed that spring, too consumed by the urge not to confess it, I whispered words to this effect into the porch of her ear. “Oh, Flipper,” she whispered back. “What do you mean? Some plantation thing?” My horrendous silence allowed the implication, Yeah, maybe, inverted? She placed her long fingers on my cheek and brushed my hair back with her other hand, as you might pat a child’s cowlick. She loved me enough by then, if only as a friend, not to be shy in my presence. For that, I’ll always be grateful to her — that she showed me who she was. “I get it,” she said. “I do. But not for us, Flipper. Not for us. Okay?” She shushed the stream of apologies that came out of me for even asking, holding a finger to my lips, and then, to my amazement, raised her head up off the pillow and kissed me.

So I kept that longed-for defeat in check, not wanting to trouble her, holding it at bay as I have ever since. It would be much tidier if the negligible chipping away I’ve done at the edifice of white supremacy issued purely from a concern for justice. But the fact is my life has been all caught up with black women (romantically, I would have been a lot better off as a lesbian of color, that’s for sure) so there’s no use pretending to some fiction of principle. I never would have kept up my work if I hadn’t seen up close the depression and self-hatred that the women I’ve tried to be with have suffered but not wanted to discuss. To think that their states of mind have nothing to do with politics or history would be as pitiably ignorant as imagining that my pining for them — their bodies and mothering care — isn’t likewise haunted.

I realize I’m going on here a bit in answer to the question on work history, it’s just that listing dates of employment doesn’t really get at what I’ve been up to. My real work began during that first reprieve of Klonopin. Caleigh had met a woman named Myra, a grad student at BC who TA’d one of her discussion sections. They struck up a conversation after class one day and had coffee a few times. Myra had grown up in Atlanta, gone to the University of Chicago undergrad, tended bar in Boston for several years, and now DJ’d at an all-women’s night in Central Square once a month. I could tell by the way Caleigh looked at me out of the corner of her eye whenever she mentioned her name that she was testing me to see how I would react. It is a measure of the power of benzos on the virgin mind that I could listen to Caleigh, who meant everything to me, talk about having coffee with this woman and not end up hospitalized for jealousy. She clearly wanted permission. She had forgiven me my terrible need for her. She had let herself be swayed by my devotion, and eventually persuaded by it. She’d even forgiven me my guilt for desiring her. What was I going to do now? Stand in the way of what she was trying to tell me she wanted? Just a few months earlier, my ambient dread and my obsession with her had been so entwined I would have been reduced to pleading and threats. Instead, I found myself bewildered at the equanimity of my response. It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear. For a moment there, I was able to step outside that, to hear what she wanted to be.

When Caleigh suggested that the three of us form a reading group to make up for the paltry offerings in African diaspora studies, it seemed like a perfect solution, a way for Caleigh not to have to choose between us. Myra was wary of me at first, knowing Caleigh and I were still sleeping together, and finding it hard to believe a white man could have much to contribute to discussions of black life. I didn’t blame her for this. But with Caleigh to vouch for me, she eventually came around, and the three of us spent our first month reading that giant of postcolonial psychiatry, Frantz Fanon. Not the world’s leading feminist, but you could fit on a postcard what he didn’t get about the psychic half-life of colonialism. On his advice, so to speak, we surveyed the more recent clinical-psych literature for studies on the treatment of black patients (shockingly, there wasn’t much). But I did come across the study that helped set me on my path.

A British psychologist working at a clinic in Manchester had written a paper about his treatment of black teenagers with recurring nightmares of slavery. Some dreamt of being confined to the holds of ships amid the withered and dying, others of being publicly stripped and lashed. One boy, who evinced no particular knowledge of black history, had a recurring nightmare that he was being hung from a lamppost and dismembered. It was the transcripts that got me. The author had excerpted them in an appendix. One of his subjects, in language replete with Mancunian slang, described seeing blood run down his chest and realizing it was leaking from the cuts inflicted by the iron collar around his neck. Not knowing what to make of the phenomenon — none of the boys knew each other and they attended different schools — the psychologist had interviewed family members to see if there were stories of enslavement among ancestors that might have been passed along in family lore, giving rise to the boys’ nocturnal fantasies. But he found no such pattern. What the boys did share were symptoms of depression, which, as the author noted, were not unusual among black teenagers, though few came in for treatment. It was the press of these particular nightmares that had driven them over the barrier of pride and stigma to seek his help.

The oddity of it all — kids from the Midlands, not the old Confederacy, the uncanny exactitude of their descriptions — would have been memorable enough. But what lodged in me was an observation that the author himself made little of. Toward the opening of the paper, as he was describing the boys’ working-class social milieu, he mentioned in passing that each went regularly to clubs and that all were avid music fans. Alas, he didn’t get their playlists. But given where and when they’d grown up, it wasn’t hard to guess what they’d been hearing on the dance floor — and it wasn’t white punk. It was house and early techno, with some Kraftwerk and New Order thrown in. Of course, there were thousands of kids listening to the same stuff at the same time whose sleep went untroubled by the Middle Passage. And yet it turned out that what these kids had in common wasn’t great-grandmothers from West Indian plantations but black American dance tracks. No one doubted that the agony of slavery haunted generations of spirituals and gospel. Why not the latest twelve-inch? These boys weren’t listening to Mahalia Jackson sing about how she got over, but somewhere in the cut the same ghosts were being shaken loose. There was no empirical conclusion to draw from any of this, as if you could measure the pain in music. But spending my days reading the history of lynchings and race riots, and then playing my records at the station, I kept returning to the image of these boys dancing and dreaming through some dark repetition bigger than any of us.

I suppose, then, you could say that our little reading group was a success all around. Caleigh and Myra got to spend lots of time together, and began hooking up that spring. And I got the assignment that weighs on me still — my real work — to get down in words what doesn’t live in words. To track ghosts by ear.

Have you ever taken any of the following medications? If so, when, for how long, and what was your response?

Luvox

The trouble being that, after that one blessed year, the Klonopin stopped working. Not overnight, but gradually. I didn’t wake up convinced I was dying, just less unafraid than I’d been in the halcyon days. Morning by morning. Until I didn’t wait anymore until after breakfast to take the pill, but swallowed it as soon as I woke, hoping an empty stomach would let more of the drug into my system. That Caleigh had stopped sleeping with me and started having sex with Myra is what you could call a contributing environmental factor to my increased anxiety. But Dr. Gregory saw no problem — nor, for shit sure, did I — in simply increasing my dose. I’d responded to it once, why not again? And indeed, it did the trick. The second cut wasn’t the deepest, but there was relief in it all the same. I was able to see Caleigh almost every day without crying. And able to let her talk me through the losing of her, just as she had talked me through the loving of her in the first place. With enormous patience, she listened to me describe every facet of the pain she was causing me. How I lay in bed thinking of her with Myra, bitten by envy and loneliness; or about the hours spent listening to the records we’d listened to together, knowing I’d see her that same evening but not be allowed to kiss her. She would hug me, as she had before, telling me it was going to be okay, that she was the unlucky one for leaving me, even if she had to. And she’d assure me again and again that I wasn’t as pathetic as I felt, carrying on like I did, needing her to be the one to help me through it, and even help me accept her help, against the taunting voice that told me to show some “self-respect” and masculine amour propre when all I wanted was to be in the same room with her no matter what the conditions.

Through it all she kept calling me Flipper, and I called her Cee, and we even added new variations — Flipster, Flimmy, the Flimster, Ceedling, Ceester, Ceemer. It was this more than anything that made me realize with relief that she didn’t want to depart our cocoon of affection and commiseration any more than I did, regardless of who was sleeping with whom. It was as if we were becoming childhood best friends, siblings, and an old married couple simultaneously. If she took a trip home or away with Myra, I’d speak to her each day on the phone. We talked as we had from the start about what we were reading and listening to. After a few months, I could even tolerate hearing her speak about Myra, now and then offering her advice on how she could overcome her skittishness about being with another woman. I knew then we would never lose each other, no matter whom either of us became involved with. Our private world was too necessary to both of us to be replaced wholesale with another. I wanted to live with her. I didn’t mind if Myra lived with us too. I could be their roommate. It took Caleigh a while to convince me this would be a bad idea. That we could still talk every day, and that it would be easier for me to meet a romantic partner if I wasn’t always with the two of them. So they found an apartment in Allston together, and I moved in with Alec’s old high school friend Ben.

Which is when this second reprieve of Klonopin came to an end, only faster this time. Celia and Alec have since come to form a dim view of Dr. Gregory, seeing him as little more than a guilt-ridden pill pusher who sedated me to fend off his fear of losing another patient, rather than tackling the issues at hand. But frankly I still consider him a humanitarian. The increased doses are what I asked of him, and what I needed. When a physician ups a diabetic’s insulin there’s no question of indulgence or rectitude, just a condition and a drug it would be malpractice not to give. Which is hardly to say I have no regrets. I regret that the reprieves kept getting shorter.

Paxil

And it is not as if, in the years following that first blush of benzos, Dr. Gregory didn’t try anything new. He would sit in his Eames chair, all mild-mannered and bald, in pleated chinos and a V-neck, asking how I had been, nodding gravely as I answered, and every few months, along with the increase in Klonopin, he’d suggest a new drug we might add to the mix to help dampen the growing general fear.

Serzone

I’d taken to writing music reviews, not for the abysmal pay, but to bring to light the overlooked wonders issued from labels run out of bedrooms from Oakland to Eindhoven, kids sampling their uncles’ Run-D.M.C. records into an old-school hip-hop revival, or those unemployed Belgian pranksters turning out tracks hard enough to keep a warehouse of teens dancing till Sunday noon. I never went in for rave culture myself. I was usually in bed by ten. But before it collapsed under the weight of its own promotional shtick and became an ecstasy theme park for weekend punters, it spawned a number of ambient house masterworks that I listen to to this day.

Other than that, I worked in record shops. Not at the chains, which I couldn’t stomach, but various independents. I lasted about a year at a place down on Newbury before selling Nirvana albums to Armani-clad foreign students drove me to a storefront in East Boston frequented mostly by local DJs. I got paid even less, but at least the company was tolerable. My student loans had long since come due but I didn’t have the money to make the payments so I shoved the envelopes in a drawer to be opened at some point down the line when I’d gotten things sorted.

As long as I was in the store itself, talking to other people about music I believed in, ordering it from distributors or listening to it on headsets, my shakiness was kept mostly at bay. My distracted energy got absorbed into the pace of the tracks themselves or driven into the necessity to convert others to their power. In Walter Benjamin, there is the concept of the vanishing mediator, the person or idea that travels between cultures, pollinating one with the other, before disappearing from view, the way black musicians carried blues and rock into recording studios and then vanished from sight and accounting, listening to their invention played out by white bands. If I could sell a hip-hop DJ on a reissued Dolly Parton album or place in the hands of some devoted European Industrialist kid from RISD a Pet Shop Boys aria and make him hear the kinship, then my job for the day was done. I’ve never made a piece of music in my life, which is another thing my mother considers a pity, but as long as I was inside it, passing it on into others’ ears, I wasn’t absolutely alone.

Still, afterwards, riding the T back to Ben’s apartment on the margins of the South End, wondering if Caleigh would be home when I called her, and, when she wasn’t, sitting on the couch with Ben nursing the first of the evening’s beers while he got high, I would sense the fear I’d woken with slink back in, accusing me of failing to pay it sufficient mind, mocking the day’s respite as an illusion.

Ben, a semiprofessional knitter, had taken me in out of the kindness of his heart and a need for rent money (and also perhaps as a favor to Alec). He ran a tight ship, insisting on extreme tidiness to make room for all his wool and mail-order supplies. He regularly updated the chore regime posted on the fridge, which left me in a state of suspense as to what I would be required to sweep or scrub in any given week. But once he had put down his needles for the day and smoked a joint, he achieved an enviable calm while cooking vegetables for us and watching Simpsons reruns. We’d become friends, of the sort men often are, in that we daily confirmed each other’s existence but pretty much left it at that.

After ratatouille and an hour of cartoons, I’d try Caleigh again, and if she didn’t answer, I’d call Celia or Alec, not to confess in full the shape of the trap, because they had their own to avoid, but just to talk with someone for whom I didn’t have to mask my basic state. I knew they wanted to help. They would always ask, hopefully, how my meds were working. I’ve never stopped wanting to give them at least some reason to think I’m getting better.

Anafranil

There are years it is difficult to account for in retrospect. Most of my twenties, for instance. I can’t say exactly when it was that the vinyl shop in East Boston went out of business. Late in the first Clinton administration, maybe? Or how long it took me to find the job at the left-wing call center. We raised money for whatever not-for-profit had hired our shift to rake through old lists of Mother Jones subscribers and members of the ACLU who might be talked into giving ten or twenty dollars to endangered fish or gay people. I can say that getting paid on commission blew. You’d be soliciting some Arkansas outlier for a Native American higher-ed fund, watching the seconds disappear on the huge digital clock above the supervisor’s desk as the person you’d already given up on began explaining how the bills for her fibromyalgia treatment had cleared out her savings and was making her wonder if she’d have to give up her dog, a three-legged rescue with hypertension and hookworms, and you’d want to say, Look, lady, it’s through with you, you’re terminal, that shit’s not improving. But you know what? If you chip in fifty bucks to the college fund, someone not yet down for the count might actually get an education, so stop yakking and pay it forward. I’d like to afford that burrito in four hours and you’re not helping. And why did the owner of the call center drive a BMW? Because a bunch of essentially unemployed people managed to suck enough pocket change out of enervated hippies to fund at least one upper-middle-class existence. As for Anafranil, I put up with the tachycardia for a while, but being unable to take a shit more than every ten days proved untenable. Which is a pity given that its eradication of my libido took the edge off missing Caleigh as sorely as I still did.

Celexa

There was a downside to seeing my father’s old shrink and never paying his bills, which was that when he eventually stopped returning my calls, I didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. His unannounced withdrawal from my care after all this time seemed highly unprofessional given how essential his prescription pad had become to my daily functioning, but I figured he’d spoken to colleagues who’d suggested it was time he extracted himself from such a messy relationship. I could have used a referral, but there we are. I didn’t want to ask my mother for the money to actually pay for a psychiatrist, but what option did I have? I was on things you weren’t supposed to come off of unsupervised.

The guy I found at Boston City Hospital was only a few years older than I was and wore a wedding ring. I’m against marriage on principle — not love and trust, which I pine for, but the legal entity, given its history — so it wasn’t Dr. Bennet’s marital status per se that I envied, but the indication it gave that he, too, was one of the elect, enjoying the plenary ease of intimacy with a woman who had chosen him over and above other men. And of course he had a steady income, and all his hair, and that mild-jock physique of the former team-sports player, giving him the air of physical carelessness, that impunity which went along with even the merely passable good looks prized by women for the social capital they offer, and I suppose the pleasure. Which returns us, by the logic of opposites, willy-nilly, to the category of the loser or creep, that staple of high school which lives on in a youth-obsessed culture, hunting people into middle age — the erotically failed man whose desire is imagined to grow lascivious with embitterment until his loneliness has made him so ugly he’s a pervert, beginning then to shade into the monster of the pedophile, subject to the most righteous and violent anger of all, the rage of parents on behalf of their minor children. Which isn’t to say that meeting Dr. Bennet “triggered” anything in me, just that I wanted to be sure he wasn’t going to bluster his way into some misbegotten get-tough approach and start cutting back on my Klonopin. Luckily, he proved more humane than that. Like Dr. Gregory, he didn’t want to subtract drugs, only to add them.

Effexor

When he asked about the work I did, I told him about music as the medium for the transgenerational haunting of the trauma of slavery, and how what I needed most was a research library, a JSTOR account, and three years of postgraduate funding. To be honest, I didn’t care about the degree. I’m not an academic careerist. I would have been happy simply with the time to write. But it was hard to get at what needed to be done after eight hours of pleading with white liberals for the habitat of a frog. So I settled for a new prescription. The Effexor plus the Klonopin, combined with the lithium Bennet put me on after hearing about Dad, added up to a minor reprieve of their own, enough in any case to let me focus on applying to graduate school and get started on the reparations work Caleigh and I had been discussing for several years already.

To the extent that people consider the reparations movement at all, which most don’t, they think of General Sherman and Special Field Order No. 15, granting freed slaves the coastal lands from the Carolinas to northern Florida, the infamous promise of forty acres and a mule, and so imagine that the modern push amounts to a claim for cash for every living descendant of a chattel slave. Whereas in fact the movement’s first demand is an official U.S. government apology and recognition of the injustice of slavery, accompanied by suits against banks and insurance companies whose prior corporate entities profited directly from the uncompensated labor of the human beings they owned. And only then, a congressional allocation of billions of dollars to be spent on institution building to improve the education, health, and well-being of African-Americans generally. After all, the U.S. compensated Japanese-Americans for interning them during World War II, and Germany paid restitution to surviving victims of the Holocaust. That governments should pay for the sins of their past, even if committed by repudiated regimes, is hardly unprecedented. The caustic, knee-jerk rejection of the idea of restitution for slavery is but an indication of why it is necessary. What we ignore only persists.

So Caleigh and I, with Myra’s assistance, set to work writing a brief, explanatory pamphlet, our modest contribution to the consciousness-raising effort. I wanted to put an eighteenth-century schematic drawing of the hold of a slave ship on the cover, to show how the ancestors of our fellow citizens had arrived here, but Caleigh favored an early-twentieth-century photograph of a black dirt farmer harnessed to his plow. We ran off five hundred copies at Kinko’s, and from then on I always made sure to have a supply in my bag so that when riding the bus or the T, I could spend a few minutes imposing them on my fellow passengers.

Lexapro

When I did get around to applying to grad school the year I turned thirty, I was surprised, given how much thought and study I’d put in, to be rejected by each and every one. Being white was probably not an advantage in my chosen field of African-American studies (though, naturally, that is an admissions preference I wholly support, no matter its effect on me). By this time, my roommate Ben had performed the hat trick of meeting a highly intelligent and alluring woman outside of his knitting circles, maintaining his sense of self-worth long enough for them to complete a course of dating, and eventually convincing her, Christine, to move in with us. As the rejection letters arrived weekly through March and April, the two of them didn’t know what to say after asking me how my day had been and hearing only another report of canceled possibility. Any more than Celia or Alec did. I’d never felt the least bit competitive with either of them (though Celia’s ease in finding a new boyfriend each time she broke up with an old one irked me at times), and I put out of my mind the fact that my sister already had a master’s in social work and that Alec had completed his journalism degree, despite being five years younger.

Wellbutrin

There continued, the following spring, to be no rational basis to resent either of them in particular when I got rejected everywhere I applied for a second time. The left-wing phone bank had cut back on staff by then and I was unemployed, which Dr. Bennet was helpful enough to remind me was a major life stressor. As in, justifying of increased doses across the board. Generalized anxiety, that’s how he now described my condition. He suggested a support group, which conveniently met just down the hall from his office. Where the support group met that would help me get over going to this support group wasn’t clear. But oh well.

I thought fibromyalgia in Arkansas was bad, but there was no telephonic remove from the Gulf War vet who slept curled around his rifle and looked at us as if we were bloody remains, or the woman being charged with child neglect because she could never clean enough to satisfy herself it was safe to feed her malnourished offspring. Our youngest colleague still wet himself at the age of twenty-two. When we weren’t hearing about melted corpses on Iraq’s highway of death, we could kick back to the tale of a bankrupt lawyer’s sixteen-hour odyssey to find a lightbulb in sufficiently undimpled packaging. Someone once said, It’s all about the parties you go to. No kidding. The facilitator was into what she called “aversion treatment.” The lawyer was instructed to go straight from the meeting to the nearest drugstore, walk to the housewares section, and pick up the first 100-watt bulb his eyes alighted upon. Not so clear that the vet should cluster-bomb downtown Attleboro for a little DIY reenactment, but the woman afraid of her groceries could force herself to cut broccoli right on the counter and then eat it with her little ones. Before my terror at the reality of these people’s lives caused me to flee the scene, I got two assignments from the facilitator myself: to leave the house just when I expected Caleigh to call, and to empty the drawer where I put all my unpaid bills and sort them in order of priority, presumably so I could figure out which one to talk with my mother about first. I completed neither.

Remeron

Flummoxed at my refractory symptoms, Dr. Bennet ran me through a complete re-eval, said I needed to stop talking about psychoanalytic theory in our sessions, and put me on enough uppers to cheer a POW. I recall a period of two or three months when my head felt compressed to the density of an anvil strapped to a potting wheel left on high speed in a sun-drenched meadow. It was like getting root-canal work while vacationing in the tropics. Indeed, the experiment came to an end when my stepped-up jaw-grinding caused me to chip a molar. But for a while there I did get out of my room at Ben’s a bit more often. I toured the remaining indie record shops on Saturday mornings when the new shipments arrived. It was on one such outing, after many dateless years, that I encountered Bethany. She had a tiny glistening nose stud, and a nearly shaved head, and was flipping through a bin of Aphex Twin. Need I say more?

Celia

Jasper was an Anglophile from Coeur d’Alene. He did his best to monogram everything he owned. Today it was a royal-blue turtleneck with his chosen initials — JHP, for Jasper Henry Philips — done in three-inch brocade letters outlined with sequins and pinned at the breast like a Michael Jackson costume still under construction. So far, he’d avoided the shelters by couch-surfing and squatting. When Michael phoned me at work, we were almost at the end of our session, which Jasper had again idled away with his fantasies, this time of befriending Princess Diana, his all-time-favorite celebrity. I had five minutes left of my weekly effort to find him a job.

I told Michael I couldn’t talk.

“What about later?” he asked. “Can we talk later?”

A girl who hadn’t shown up in three weeks was waiting outside my door. I had appointments all afternoon. I needed to go running after work.

“I’ll try you,” I said. “But it’ll be later, your time.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he’d forgotten we lived on different coasts. “Okay.”

We spoke twice a week at least, but in the evenings or on weekends. I was surprised he even knew the name of my agency to look up the number. Something had agitated him; he was calling to be assuaged.

“I’ll try you,” I said. “I will.”

“Sooo,” Jasper said as soon as I hung up, “your boyfriend’s traveling — and he isn’t your husband because you’re not wearing a ring. Where is he? Paris, London?”

To help establish a rapport during our first meeting, I’d made the mistake of mentioning I’d lived in England. Now it was all he wanted to talk about.

I suggested we look over the listings together. There were openings for baggers at the Marina Safeway, temp-driver jobs he didn’t qualify for because he didn’t have a license, a copy-shop assistant position in Oakland, and the usual volunteer stuff, distributing condoms or working at the Meals on Wheels kitchen, what the agency called “community networking opportunities.”

I needed him to focus and commit to three applications before our next session. If I’d had an hour with him, I would have asked whom he was spending his time with, if anyone was pressuring him for sex, how he was doing physically and emotionally. But that wasn’t my job. I was supposed to prevent him from becoming homeless (which he effectively already was), help him find legitimate employment, and coach him on maintaining whatever support structure he already had, which in his case consisted mostly of asking each week if he’d been in touch with his mother. My older colleagues often didn’t bother with parents when a client was no longer a minor, but according to Jasper, his mother had left his stepfather — the person he’d fled from in the first place — so it seemed at least worth a try for him to talk with her, given what his options were.

He stood by the window now, gazing into the alley as if across a rough, romantic sea. “What does your boyfriend do in London? Is he an international businessman? Does he feature those fierce three-piece tweed suits? Or cravats, does he wear cravats?”

I couldn’t decide which of my brothers he’d get on with better, Michael or Alec.

“That wasn’t my boyfriend,” I said.

“Your lover, then.”

“Jasper, if you don’t apply to anything, I’ve got to put that in your file, and in a few weeks they’re going to tell me to terminate you from services.”

“If you lived in England, how come you don’t have an accent?”

“Listen—”

“Okay, I’ll apply. Just tell me.”

“I’ve lived here more.”

“Did you grow up in a house with servants?”

“Where do you get all this?”

He picked up and examined the tape dispenser on my desk as though admiring the facets of a crystal vase. I would have said he was high, but his speech and movements were too precise, his affect too consistent. He was practicing, that’s what he was doing, rehearsing for a future life.

“My grandmother said it was the classiest place she’d ever been, and that I would love it there. She had a videotape of Diana’s wedding. We used to watch it all the time. People thought she was pretentious, being into all that, so I knew she was onto something, pissing those jackasses off. She left me all that stuff, the books and music and the mugs with the coats of arms, everything she’d bought over there and all the stuff she’d collected. Most of it’s at my mom’s. But I brought a few things with me.”

I pictured him there with his grandmother, on their little island of manners. I wanted to draw him out on it, to hear what it meant to him. And from there maybe get him to talk about his growing up, and eventually about what exactly his stepfather had done that caused him to leave. Jasper was one of the clients who shared something of himself, if only because he desired an audience. Most of the kids I saw were sullen and defensive, and treated me as another scold of the adult world who didn’t care what they felt. It wasn’t that I wanted to cut him off now, just that our half hour was up. I told him he had to call me with the three jobs off the list he was going to pursue so I could set up the interviews, and that I needed copies of his applications at our next appointment.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” he said. “People do live in castles there.”

“Like ten people, Jasper. Most of them are just normal. They’re not that different than here. Really.”

“Normal like you? Like college and going to Europe and working here because you feel good helping ignorant people like me? That kind of normal?”

“Our time’s up,” I said. “I have someone waiting.”

“People always get angry when I tell the truth. Happens every time.”

On the outbound N Judah that evening I noticed a man in a three-piece suit. Instead of reading the paper folded in his hands, his eyes crept along the bodies of various young women, particularly those in skirts and lipstick, his glance occasionally falling on me as well, curious but uncertain, and a bit aggressive, a bit pissed off, as if I wasn’t giving him something that belonged to him.

Jasper’s image had stuck with me. Of my boyfriend dressed in tweed, like the suits Dad used to wear. Paul sitting at a big conference table with other men in suits and calling me after his meeting, as I suppose Dad had called Mom. I’d never wanted such a partner, or even been able to imagine why anyone would. Still, getting back to our apartment and finding Paul lying on the couch, reading under a blanket, a glass of bourbon beside him on the floor, I found myself wondering what it might be like if Jasper’s fantasy were even a little true.

The drink irked me. It threw his sugar off. Which made it more likely that he would have a low in the night, waking us both. But if it was just one, or maybe two, and he drank them slowly enough and timed his shots right, it might still be fine.

“What’s up?” he said. “How was the day?”

The fact that he was flat on the couch suggested his hadn’t been exactly fruitful. But then through the open French doors into the kitchen I noticed the sink was empty of dishes, and the cereal we’d needed was on the counter. So he’d been shopping. Which meant that he would make dinner, holding up his end of the bargain we’d struck: if he was going to work only part-time while he wrote his screenplay, he had to do more than his normal quarter share of the domestic work.

“The usual,” I said. “I badgered homeless kids to present themselves in a professional light.”

He chuckled, and took another sip of his drink. “Well, I finished my second act,” he said.

I was headed into the bedroom to change, but stopped in the doorway. “Really?” He grinned with an openness and satisfaction I hadn’t seen in him in a long while.

“That’s great,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“It’s just a draft. But thanks.”

He followed me into the bedroom and watched me start taking off my work clothes. He’d made the bed as well, and put away the laundry. For once, there was nothing to be disappointed in. Which left me with just the feeling of the disappointment itself. I tried to let go of it as I looked for my shorts and sneakers, to shuffle the weight of it off, the semiconstant low-grade suspicion that he was inadequate. That he didn’t have enough energy. That I had to provide it for both of us. That I would resent this no matter what else he did, or how well he managed his insulin.

He was standing by the door, smiling, as if his good cheer were nothing unusual. He hadn’t gotten his hair cut in a while and it hung down over his forehead, his dark curls set off by his pale, nearly unblemished skin. His boyishness had always been part of his allure. He was thirty-one, two years older than I was, but could pass for twenty-five. The most handsome man I’d been with. And the most ardent. At the beginning. Which had made a difference — his confidence. I want you. He’d been able to say that, clearly and aloud, before he knew what my response would be. Standing on the back porch of a triple-decker in Somerville, in frigid air, while the party carried on inside behind fogged windows. He’d put his red plastic cup down before saying it, his arms at his sides, unguarded, looking right at me. I’d had no time to think. When he leaned forward, I took the kiss, and gave it back. I wasn’t interested in being seduced. I was too wary for such credulity. But Paul had seduced me.

That was three years ago, back east, when I was still getting my master’s, and he was working at the Brattle, spending his mornings on his short film. We’d come out here to San Francisco as much to leave the place we’d both grown up as anything else. We’d found an affordable apartment far from downtown, and jobs that covered our rent, groceries, and student loans. For the first couple of years this had seemed like its own achievement, requiring nothing more. Paul’s college friends Laura and Kyle came for long weekends from Boulder, and we visited them in the summer, exploring parts of the country we had never seen. For our second Thanksgiving, I persuaded my mother, Michael, and Alec to fly across the country and I produced the full meal from our galley kitchen, after which the place seemed more like a home.

When Paul drank more than a diabetic should or we argued about petty domestic things, I would employ a kind of preemptive nostalgia, filing the episodes away under the heading A Couple’s Early Years. This generous retrospective of the present leaped ahead to forgive our moments of anger and doubt, and the occasional day when the frustration and recriminations between us became grinding. It helped alleviate my sense of having been duped into believing Paul would be the person to deliver me from my family, rather than imitate it. And really it was okay, and most often better than that, being the object of his desire, sensing he would never leave me. That we were safe.

In summer, when there was more daylight, I used the track in the park, at the old polo grounds with their crumbling bleachers and weedy track. There, at least, I had a discrete lane and a clear shot. But in winter, I settled for a dead-end street nearby with barely any traffic. It would have been simpler to take up distance running, but I’d never got in the habit, or felt the satisfaction of it. I ran to move as fast as I could, to the point of no more speed to give, not just once at the end of a long run, but over and over in a rhythm: sprint, release, jog back to the line; sprint, release, jog, until my legs gave out and my chest hurt. I’d been timing myself for too long to give up the stopwatch, but I didn’t run to hit a number anymore, it just let me know how hard I could still press. There was no audience. I didn’t do meets. I wasn’t even running against my own best time, though I could have.

I kept it brief, knowing Paul was cooking, bursting hard and early on hundred-yard dashes, and running back to the line faster than my usual recovery speed. I quickened my pace the more tired I got, holding up only for the occasional passing car, or people crossing the street on their way home, a few of whom were used to me now and nodded or waved. The lamps high up the electric poles lit the street in a yellow brightness, no trees to block their glare, just the two rows of parked cars, the wide sidewalks, the barely indented strips of curb in front of the garage doors with the No Parking signs, and the shaded windows above — a couple of blocks of the Outer Sunset never more than Sunday quiet.

Eventually, my muscles gave out, and I got to that deep, whole-body fatigue that made the pain worth it.

These were the moments of the week when my mind was clearest. When the internal nagging stopped, I noticed the air and the sound of the city, and things became simple again.

I wasn’t happy. This much came as no great revelation. But my unhappiness had become mired in a routine that obscured the obvious choice, which I kept trying to avoid. I had to quit my job. Kids like Jasper didn’t get work because we hit the ratio, as my boss called it, of clients to applications, like hitting a monthly sales figure, all to ensure the state would renew our contract. If they found jobs it was because, mostly without our help, they managed not to feel so shitty about themselves for long enough to actually want a life. And that’s what I wanted to be a part of. Their feeling better.

San Francisco was lousy with therapists and social workers, but if I registered with Medi-Cal, and got the agency to give me some of their overflow of counseling referrals, I’d have as many people as I was willing to take, albeit for a pittance. I could make it on my own, if I took on enough clients. And if Paul went back to working full-time.

The fog off the ocean cloaked the lights only a few blocks ahead as I began walking home, and soon encompassed me in a cool drizzle. When I got upstairs, I went straight into the shower, and stayed under the hot water awhile.

Paul had made a vegetable stir-fry with peanut sauce, and, in a rare flourish, broiled chicken to go with it. I asked him about his good day, about how much revision he thought the new act would require, and how he wanted to move forward from here, listening to him think it out aloud, which I knew he found useful, and seemed tonight to even enjoy. I wished he would share these things more with his friends, but he’d always been hesitant about it, and counted on me as a sounding board more than anyone else. I listened for a good while, glad to sense his mood lifting.

At some point, after a pause, I mentioned what I’d been thinking about on my run.

The first thing he said was “When?”

Before I could answer, the phone rang in the living room. Our eyes met, but neither of us moved. We remained like that for a moment, as the phone rang a second and then a third time, frozen in another little episode of our ongoing struggle to control the disposition of each other’s bodies. The daily tussle of two people in a small space, opening and closing doors, navigating a kitchen and bathroom, nudging and reaching over and gently pushing, often with affection but often too with this petty resistance.

After the third ring, Paul was the one who stood, and walked into the other room. He told whoever it was to hold on. Then he returned to the kitchen, took his seat opposite me, and, picking up his knife and fork with great deliberation, said, “Michael.”

“I told you about her — Bethany — from the record store, the Aphex Twin fan, we had the drink at the Middle East last week, and I called her the next day and we had pizza that night in Kenmore? I told you about it, that we were together for five hours and she told me everything, about just getting out of the hospital, and her parents not wanting to talk to her, but that her mother was sick and she needed to go back to Cleveland to see her, remember?

“It was like we were in a relationship right away, she trusted me that much, and she said she thought she might love me, and I told her all about Dad and Caleigh, and she said she wished I could come to Cleveland with her, but that her parents think everyone she’s met in Boston is part of the problem, and that she just needs to go back and get into school there. But then after that, after I talked to you, I’ve seen her every day since then, except Tuesday — I had a temp gig. And she told me she wasn’t going to be leaving right away, which was obviously a huge relief, because she needed to get her rent money together first, so I felt relieved, like we weren’t racing toward some kind of deadline.

“Because at that point we still hadn’t really said anything official to each other, and we hadn’t slept together, because I didn’t want to pressure her, she’s obviously in a transitional state. And I didn’t want to bring her back to Ben’s anyway, because then he’d ask questions about her, and I just didn’t want to deal with all that. But I did take her home on the T to Allston not last night but the night before. With no ulterior motive. But we were still talking when we got there, and she asked me up to her place, and I did actually end up spending the night, not in her bed, on the floor, on her roommate’s air mattress, and obviously I didn’t sleep, but around dawn, she did reach out and take my hand, and we actually did end up getting together that night. Or that morning. Which, I didn’t even know if that would happen, because she’s been mostly with women, but she said I was different, and that she was so glad we’d met, that no one had ever listened to her the way I did, and we went out afterwards for bagels, and spent the rest of the morning together until I went home to get meds. Which was yesterday.

“And then we were supposed to get together tonight in Central Square at seven o’clock, and I called her to confirm but there was no answer. Not for hours. And when I finally got her roommate, her roommate said she was out and she didn’t know where she was. Which is when I tried you at work. But anyway, obviously I just went to where we’d agreed to meet, and I waited two and a half hours figuring she was just late, but she never showed up, she just didn’t show up. And when I call her roommate’s now I get the answering machine — I’ve left three messages already — but I don’t have any other number for her, so I’m thinking of going over there now, but it’s close to midnight, and by the time I walk to the T, get over there, and figure out what’s going on, I’d miss the last train back, but I don’t know what else to do. What should I do?”

Across the street, a young couple with a fancy stroller passed under the streetlight, returning home from dinner at one of the places up on Irving, and it struck me our mother would never have been out this late with a baby.

“You just have to give her space,” I said. “You shouldn’t go over there now. She probably just needs a day off. You should go to bed.”

“I can’t go to bed, something’s happened. She’s been late before, but she’s always showed up, and now nothing, which means either she’s in some kind of danger, or — and I don’t even want to think about this — she’s decided to end everything between us, maybe because of something I said that I didn’t realize offended her, or she was just lying to me and doesn’t care at all, which I just couldn’t stand, it would just be a nightmare, so it’s not as if I can sleep, but I just don’t know if I should go over there now, or if that could make things worse and I should just white-knuckle it until the morning. That’s what I’m trying to decide.”

“I just said to you that you shouldn’t go over there.”

“But I can’t decide if I should or not.”

I could hear Paul rinsing his plate in the sink. He hadn’t waited for me, and I didn’t blame him.

“Michael.”

“What?”

“This isn’t about her.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve talked about it. The panic, it isn’t about her.”

“That may be — I’m not opposed to that thesis — but she’s the only solution to it, there’s no other solution.”

“You met her a week ago.”

“Yeah. What difference does that make? I’m as in love with her as I’ve ever been with anybody.”

“That’s absurd, and you know it is.”

“Right, then. Well. I thought at least you’d empathize — being abandoned like that.”

“You haven’t been abandoned. She flaked on one date. She just got out of a psych ward, you slept together for the first time last night, and what is she? Nineteen? And you’re thirty-one—”

“Twenty, she turned twenty last month.”

I closed my eyes, and saw him there in his room at Ben’s, his heart racing like a bird’s. He would have already talked to Caleigh about all this for a couple of hours at least, but that wasn’t enough. As soon as he’d gotten off the phone with her, he’d dialed my number.

Nothing I could say would help. It wasn’t for my advice that he’d called, no matter what he told himself. Tomorrow my mother would phone and ask if I’d spoken to him, and tell me that she was worried about him, about this Bethany woman, and how upset he seemed, as if it were a new and wholly discrete problem. And after that Alec and I would compare notes, gauging together how serious the episode was, to no more fruitful an end than measuring it against our own tolerance for more of the same.

“And she doesn’t care about my age anyway, she said so, she said that I understood her better than anyone she’d ever met, and that I listened to her more than anyone. And I don’t have any problem with her being twenty. If we really understand each other, none of that matters. We could move in together while she’s finishing school, and I can help her with her work, and with dealing with her parents. I think that’s the plan, we haven’t talked about it fully, but I think she’s open to that, and at this point I need that to happen, I can’t wait any longer, which maybe it’s harder for you to get, being with Paul, but Bethany is perfect — I know you think that isn’t possible — and I don’t mean she’s a perfect human being, but when am I going to meet someone that much younger than me who’s willing to share their life with me, and reads James Baldwin? Who isn’t Caleigh. She said she wants me to help her with her thesis, and then help her get into grad school. But if something’s happened now, or her roommate or someone else — her parents maybe — are starting to talk to her about me, and maybe turn her against me, I have to talk to her, it’s the only way. I guess if I miss the last train, I could take a taxi home, I could definitely take a taxi. But you think I shouldn’t. That I should just wait?”

My food would be cold by now, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything but the ache in my thighs from the sprints. The straining to be there for him, to be as close as I could to sitting next to him on the edge of his bed, hooking myself into each phrase and turn of his worry — it gave out eventually, as it always did, into blankness.

Most often, I just started saying, “Uh-huh,” agreeing with him however tendentious he got, and after a while I could beg off, having sympathized, if only by ceasing to argue. But tonight he was threatening to leave his room at midnight in a panic, which would only get worse when he reached her empty apartment or her roommate asked him to leave. He couldn’t protect himself from the impulse, even if he glimpsed its desperation. And so the only thing to do was wait it out, to stay on the phone talking about Bethany, asking him more about their week together, hearing if not listening once more to his dread fantasies of why she hadn’t appeared. Which is what I did.

Long after I had tired of it, so did Michael. Not enough that he wanted to stop talking about her, but a bit. Enough to drain the energy he would have needed to get out of the house.

“I guess I could just wait and try calling her again in the morning,” he said, finally.

I told him that sounded like a good idea, and that I hoped he would get some sleep.

“Trouble in paradise?”

Paul stood with his back to me at the sink, doing the dishes. When next we squabbled, he might bring this up, his having cooked and cleaned. He was banking domestic credit.

His question was snide, though not as mean as it sounded. He liked Michael. He enjoyed his company. He just thought that I indulged him. His own sister he spoke to once every three or four months. She had problems, but for whatever reason, they weren’t his. Likewise his parents, who were divorced and single. His family seemed, more than anything, incurious about one another. As if they’d known one another well in the past but had moved on now and resented, without saying as much, the need to keep up. It wasn’t so terribly unusual. Or, for that matter, pathological. I just simply couldn’t imagine it. Having the option to disattend.

“He was pretty worked up,” I said. In the cupboard, I found a recycled takeout container and put what was left of my dinner in it for lunch the next day. “Sorry about the meal.”

“No worries.”

“What I was saying before—”

“You want me to work full-time again.”

He said it flatly, without anger or apparent consent. He knew as well as I did that his working more was the only way I could afford to attempt my own practice. At least at the beginning. He’d known it all along. We had discussed it.

“I don’t mean next week,” I said.

He’d begun to sweep the kitchen floor. I wished he’d just fight me in the open, rather than going quiet, resentment staying crouched in his throat, waiting but never pouncing. But I did it, too. Always cautious, lest an argument break out that we couldn’t control.

Later, he took his book into the bedroom and lay down to read. He didn’t look up from the page as I came in and undressed. But when I sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand flat on his chest, in peace, he set the book aside and rested his hand on top of mine.

“We can talk about it, can’t we? It doesn’t have to be right away.”

He nodded, passing a hand idly through my hair. This is what I had at the end of the day that Michael and Alec didn’t. A person.

I brushed my hand across his stomach until my fingers were just under the button of his jeans.

“I thought you’d already gotten your exercise for the day,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

We never used to dig at each other like this on the verge of sex, poking at each other’s desire. But I did it now, too, when he approached me. I tested his motivation. It was the means we’d invented to argue over our doubts without mentioning them. We kept making each other prove we wanted each other. Right at the moment of openness, when you didn’t want to have to prove anything.

“What’s that’s supposed to mean?” I said, withdrawing my hand. The most effective response to the smallness of the testing was to shame the other for doing it. If he felt momentarily guilty, he’d go soft again, at least enough to get us started. And once we’d begun, his diffidence would fall away, and I could forget awhile, under the cover of his wanting.

“Nothing,” he said, pulling me by the shoulders down toward him. On his tongue, I could taste the dinner I hadn’t finished, and suddenly I was starving.

Alec

I stepped off the train at Thirty-fourth Street before the doors were even fully open and dashed for the stairs, reaching the turnstile ahead of the crowd and yanking my suitcase up over the bar as I went. Then I was off, dodging and weaving through the choke of befuddled tourists and the loiterers standing by for Jersey Transit, across the shitty low-ceilinged concourse lined with newsstands and juice shops, pleased with my skill at avoiding collisions by fractions of an inch as I dipped and swung through the on-comers, then took the stairs two at a time up to the gates for Amtrak. There, a giant herd milled under the big board, sheep to the holiday slaughter, waiting to be told which stairway to mass at. My track hadn’t posted yet. I pushed my way through, and then down the far staircase, where, by using the lower-level entrances to the tracks, I could circumvent the crush. I’d made it. I wouldn’t be without a seat. The rush and relief together left me almost high.

Thirty seconds after the board flapped my track number, I was boarding the train, even as the passengers from DC were still getting off. I grabbed a window on the right side for a view of the water, and put my computer bag on the aisle seat to dissuade anyone from joining me. The herd was staggering in now, filling the empty doubles.

Several minutes later, when the train finally jerked forward, I felt the secret glee of having avoided a seatmate. Then the car door slid open and a straggler, a thirty-something white guy in khakis and a ski jacket, spotted the empty space, and asked if it was free. If I lied, the woman across the aisle would clock my deception no later than 125th Street. I pulled my computer bag onto my lap and, turning to the window, stared past my reflection at the black walls of the tunnel.

As we rolled slowly through the darkness, the energy of hustling to make the train began to subside, letting the events of the day seep back in. The end of the apartment hunt. In the last two weeks, I’d seen nineteen places — the dregs of December — one more lightless and cramped than the next. In desperation, I’d switched to a new broker two days before I had to leave the city. She had shown me another round of anonymous, immiserating rentals, and then without warning or fanfare escorted me onto a chrome-plated elevator and then into a condo with a fully adult bedroom, a dishwasher, and floor-to-ceiling windows facing south across Nineteenth Street. It was like waking from a nightmare to discover I hadn’t in fact been sentenced to life in a dungeon. Here was a place I could entertain people, friends, colleagues, even dates. They would see the clean, polished floors, the newish appliances, the generous portion of sky, and they would relax in the safety all this implied. New York apartments either reminded you that you lived in one of the most crowded places on earth or allowed you to forget it.

But she had baited me, this new broker. The place wasn’t just slightly out of my price range, it was five hundred dollars a month north of it — plus the higher broker fee. I was in the miraculously clean bathroom — white down into the grouting — stalling for time by pretending to evaluate the fixtures when I heard the front door open. It was another agent. He had two men with him, and he was answering their questions about the building’s management. I didn’t need to see them. Their voices were enough. I glimpsed right away what would happen. How they would move in here with their curated furniture, their dachshund, their two incomes, their plans for children and a larger place in a few years, erasing me with their domestic establishment like a town car swiping a pedestrian at a crosswalk and gliding on through the light. The elect, as Michael called them. The comfortably coupled.

But this didn’t have to be. I could push back. I’d find extra freelance work, take sandwiches to the office, lengthen the schedule of my student loans, pay off less each month on my credit card, buy cheaper groceries, shop discerningly at Banana Republic sales. True, I did most of these things already. But I could do them with more discipline.

I was leaving for Christmas in four hours. When I returned, even the worst of the rentals for January 1 would be gone. I’d be moving my stuff into storage and sleeping on friends’ couches.

I got myself out of that bathroom, and, without so much as a glimpse of my competitors, led my broker into the hall and told her that I’d take it. She smiled knowingly, and hurried me back to her office. By the time I’d filled out the application and frozen the listing with a deposit, I was sure I’d miss the train.

Now, passing over the Bronx River in the dusk, all I could think was how impulsive and ruinous my grabbing had been. How I’d panicked, and sunk the money I’d saved for first and last month’s rent on a place I couldn’t afford. It wasn’t until a half hour after Stamford and half of one of the Klonopins Michael had given me that I could bring myself to start the reading I’d planned to get through. Once I started, though, I didn’t stop. I zipped through one campaign finance filing after the next, highlighting, circling, typing a stream of notes, going at it like the research was due in hours, not days.

As we reached New London, I finished marking up the pile and had nothing left to do but stare again out the window. The lines for the ferry to Orient Point filled the lot and trailed back onto the other side of the tracks, the travelers in their idling cars reading newspapers, smoking out of the slits of open windows, some napping, others appeasing their children. Above their heads, across the estuary, the naval base was lit from waterline to smokestack, a sleek gray sub moored to its giant dock. Off the coast a nearly full moon was rising. My mother would be telling whoever had already arrived to come and see.

As we crept out of the station, I noticed that the woman across the aisle was gone, along with several others nearby, leaving a number of empty seats. I glanced sidelong at the man next to me, thinking maybe he’d move now. But he was reading his book and seemed unaware. There wasn’t much to pick out in the dark. Just the sporadic lights of little houses along the water and the occasional cluster of low-slung shops at the railroad crossings of eastern Connecticut and the beginnings of Rhode Island.

When I leaned my chair back I could see my seatmate’s profile reflected in the glass. He was average-looking for a holiday returnee to the confines of the Northeast, not unhandsome, though carrying a tad extra weight in his face, for which the light beard was maybe a cover, and wearing a slightly dated pair of wire-rimmed glasses — the rims too thick — but he was definitely male and under forty.

Now that I thought back to it, before he took the seat, before he’d even asked if it was free, he had appraised me for an instant. Anyone would, checking for insanity before committing to a journey next to a stranger. But his face had brightened, and he had given me a little nod, which might have been merely relief at the fact that I wasn’t visibly crazy, but which it now occurred to me might have been something happier.

Where was the wife? Where was the girlfriend? There were no children. Suddenly, I was hard. Absurd, but involuntary.

He’d cruised me, that’s what he’d done, he’d cruised me but I hadn’t given him the chance to follow up because I’d been in such a state, and then was working like a fiend. To strike up a conversation now, from nothing, would be awkward. It would lead to facts, which could only get in the way.

I clasped my hands behind my head and stretched my legs. I hadn’t intended for my shirt and sweater to ride up off my jeans and expose an inch of my abdomen, but the mild shamelessness of it quickened my pulse (I boasted no six-pack but in this posture appeared reasonably skinny, and was, after all, younger). With my face to the window I could gaze at him with zero risk of being caught in a mistake.

And that’s what I did for the next few minutes, occasionally sensing the forced warm air of the train car on my strip of bare flesh. He shifted several times in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs, transferring his book from one hand to the other, but in his reflection, at least, I detected no spying in my direction, his attention absorbed by his sci-fi novel. Still cloaked in the immunity of facing away from him, I slouched further in my chair, and, feeling my blood move faster through my chest, reached into my pants to adjust myself. Briefly, of course, with all the crude nonchalance of the frat boy I wasn’t, but still a second or two longer than strictly necessary.

And there it was — the darting, avid glance, belying instantly any illusion of indifference. Followed quickly by an exploratory quarter-turn of his head to establish the coordinates of my own head and eyes. And then, most telling of all, imagining me to be ignorant of his inspection as I continued to peer out the window, he blatantly checked me out, head to foot, and rested his stare on the waist of my jeans. My breathing grew shallow, the drug of danger loosed into my veins. He had to see the breathing, the way my stomach and chest rose and fell. There was someone in the seat ahead and behind, making our privacy exquisitely tenuous. Without giving him any sign of acknowledgment, I slid my hand back into my pants and held my hard-on in my fist for several seconds before raising my hand back up again behind my head. That’s when he finally looked up into the window and saw my reflection.

Immediately I closed my eyes, blood racing in my head, trying to sense if it was too late, if my ruse of slovenliness and inattention might still be viable. He wasn’t that cute, after all. I’d guessed right, but had picked a soft target. Which made me pathetic in the eyes of cuter guys — the ones who mattered in the end. This was a flawed and vicious logic, I knew, but I had subscribed to it for so long now that it had a back door past self-forgiveness straight to conviction. I could override my own sneering judgment and keep going — somehow I always did — but the judgment never gave back the share of giddiness and pleasure that it stole. Self-loathing was stingy that way. It kept what it took. But it didn’t matter now. The danger had me in its thrall. The ride had begun.

I slid my hand into my pants a third time and held it there. Our eyes met for an instant on the glass, though it was hard to read his expression in the dim and shifting image. If I turned and looked at him now any vestige of intrigue would vanish. I wasn’t about to proceed to an Amtrak bathroom. We needed to string this out a bit. So I kept my head averted, and watched him gape as I gripped myself and pressed my wrist against the band of my jeans, exposing just the tip of my cock, keeping alive the fantasy that I was drowsily stretching. The window was high and narrow, cutting his reflection off at the chest, but the downward twisting motion of his shoulder told me that he too was touching himself. Game on. I pressed my wrist harder against my jeans, and another bump of adrenaline heated my face. The passengers ahead and behind were too close for either of us to whisper a thing.

When finally I did turn toward him, I avoided his eyes, staring instead at his hand in his pants. I could have been a boy again in England, in the showers at Finton Hall, stealing a glimpse of the upper-form rugby players, terrified I’d be caught, such was the liquidity of time in the press of the moment. Until we acknowledged each other, he could be anyone at all to me.

He leaned into the aisle, checking for passengers wobbling back to their seats from the café car. Seeing none, he slid his right hand onto my thigh. I closed my eyes again for a second and sank further into my seat.

I loved men. Obviously. But it wasn’t just sex. To know for certain, as I did right now, that a man was paying attention to me, to me and no one else — what more was there to want than that? To matter, and know that you mattered.

“Providence, ladies and gentlemen, Providence!”

We jerked our hands out of our pants, leaning away from each other, and the conductor lurched past. I hadn’t even noticed the lights of the city. We were already approaching the station. The older woman in front of us got up and began struggling with her bag in the rack.

“Here, let me,” the guy whose face I still hadn’t really taken in said, leaping up to help her.

“Oh, thank you,” she said. “Grandchildren! So many presents!”

The train slowed beside the platform, and the car woke from its slumber. People gathered luggage, others got up to stretch. Someone began listening to music on a headset. I took a sheaf of papers from my bag and pretended to read.

I kept up the pretense all the way out of Providence and into the darkened scrubland of southeastern Mass., as if I’d hallucinated the last twenty minutes, aware that the guy was doing the same, clutching his open novel but failing to turn the page. We’d slipped across the line but couldn’t get back over it now without one of us declaring himself.

At last, the conductor came on the loudspeaker and announced Route 128.

“This is me,” the guy said, in a quiet, controlled voice. “You?”

“Yeah,” I said, and just like that we were back in the spell of the hunt, my derision for his middling looks once more no match for the thrill.

At the station, I followed him off the train, staying three or so yards behind. Up the steps onto the covered bridge. Across the tracks, down into the parking lot. Then out past the other cars to one of the back rows, where he clicked open the doors of a Mazda sedan, and lifted his suitcase into the trunk before taking a seat behind the wheel. I put my bag in the backseat. Willing my hand not to shake, I opened the passenger-side door, and got in. He’d started the car and turned on the heat.

“I’m Gary,” he said.

“Alec,” I said.

And with that he removed his glasses, leaned over the emergency brake, and, unzipping my jeans, took my dick in his mouth. My head rocked backward against the seat and then quickly forward. He had strands of gray at his temples and the beginnings of a bald spot. I looked away to my left. Across the parking lot families milled at the platform, the disembarking travelers finding their rides in the crosshatch of headlights. I closed my eyes and lasted only a minute longer. He swallowed. I zipped my jeans, opened the door, and, grabbing my suitcase from the back, strode toward the station house, searching for the pay phone. By the time my mother answered, the anesthesia was almost complete.

Margaret

Spotting me on the bench by the library entrance, my colleague Suzanne breezes over in her miniskirt, rummaging in her bag for a cigarette. She’s wearing red lipstick and too little for the weather. A femme fatale in middle age.

“Filthy me,” she exclaims as she lights a Winston, waving her hand to disperse the smoke, her clutch of silver bracelets jangling. She coils one bare leg around the other, tucking her foot hard against her calf, then, arching her spine, exhales up and away into the gathering dusk. “And so it ends,” she says with gruff languor, as though we had just struck the set of a Broadway musical, rather than come to the end of a workweek.

She’s an unlikely librarian, her flair wasted, if not resented, by everyone but the high school boys and their fathers. Early on, she decided that I was to be her ally against the forces of boredom and small-mindedness. I was too tired to resist. She was one of the first new friends I made after John died, she and my neighbor Dorothy, and I’m still thankful for them both. Suzanne and I are by now the two stalwarts of the Walcott town library, the aging single lady and the widow.

She is always quick to note the disproportionate enthusiasm of the male trustees for our younger female coworkers, and about that she has a point. It’s not what men say or do to you. It’s what they say and do for other women, and not you. The little questions and compliments, the daily recognitions. It took me a while to understand the subtlety of it, the way invisibility works at my age. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that couples who’d known John and me together didn’t call as often after he died, but it did. I thought it was owing to the manner of his death at first, the awkwardness of the subject, but really they were just more comfortable with other married pairs.

The job’s been good for me that way — meeting new people for whom I’m simply a colleague, nothing more complicated than that.

“Come to Kanty’s with me,” she says. “You never come.”

It’s the restaurant where she entertains the bartender on Friday evenings, and drinks more wine than she should before driving home. Luckily, I’ve never had a taste for alcohol in any quantity, or else I might have been tempted by it.

I tell her I’m waiting to be picked up. “Celia and Alec came back early this year — for my birthday.”

She turns, stomps her high heel in mock indignation, then lights into me for giving her no notice. “I would have had a cake and a card! What is it with you? You’re getting a cake on Monday, be sure of it.”

“Don’t be silly,” I say, recognizing my car as it enters the parking lot.

“No,” she says. “It’s no use protesting. You will be feted whether you like it or not.”

It’s Celia who’s come. I’d expected one of the boys. She flew in only this afternoon. As soon as I close the door and wave good-bye to Suzanne, Celia puts the car back in gear and we’re off, no chance for a quick half-hug over the emergency brake now that she’s got her eyes on the road.

“Sorry if I’m late,” she says. “Michael didn’t remember what time we were supposed to get you.”

“Oh, don’t worry. How was the flight? Is Paul with Michael at the house?”

“No. He’ll be here in a few days.”

“I thought the two of you were flying together.”

“Well, it turns out we didn’t.”

I’m not supposed to ask about these things. I never was.

She looks older than a year ago, more serious still. She’s cut her hair short, and as usual wears no jewelry or makeup. Not that I do myself much, or ever encouraged her to, but the lack of it is somehow more severe on her. I sometimes wonder if she’s trying to avoid the attention she gets from men. But if I said such a thing she would roll her eyes and sigh. They all sigh, my children. It’s their most frequent response to me.

She asks me how work was. I tell her I’m just glad to be finished through the holiday. “I wish you could stay for longer,” I say.

“I told you, it was hard to find someone to cover me even for this long.”

These people she sees have such problems that I worry about her, that all their woe comes to rest on her shoulders. But she gets impatient with me if I mention it over the phone. She could have done any number of other things, but I’ve never pretended to give her professional advice. Not like her father would have. And she’s never asked for it.

In spring and fall these back roads to the house are full of color and light, but at this time of year the ground is muddy or snow-covered, and shrouded now in the early dark. In January, it will be twelve years that I’ve been doing this drive. It’s where I cried in the beginning — in the car. I suppose because I knew the crying could last only so long, that I’d be arriving home soon and would have to account for myself to Alec and Celia. That was back when I was forgetting everything — keys, bills, what to get at the grocery store. And much of what happened too, apparently, because those years are still a blur to me.

Everyone said not to make any big decisions right away. Continuity, that’s what the children needed. You might regret a rash move. Which I understood. But there was the mortgage, and the town taxes, and the credit card bills we’d run up during his illness. That Walcott would hire me twenty years after I’d last worked in a library was a miracle. Still, we’d bought the house on John’s salary, not mine. My mother had left my sister and me a small bequest, and Penny helped out now and then. But I was often at the end of my tether, not sure if I had enough in the bank to write another check. And Celia was a good organizer, she always has been. She’d sort through bills and call the credit card people if I’d fallen behind, arranging for smaller payments. She seemed to take to it naturally, without my asking her. But it was lousy of me, I’m sure, relying on her like that. I know now that she resented it, having to take care of me when we were all still reeling. I know that isn’t why she went to California, but she is the only one of them who’s gone so far.

“You saw Michael, then,” I say. “How did he seem to you?”

“I didn’t know he had a beard.”

“Yes. I’m not sure it suits him.”

“He seemed okay. Not worse.”

“Still no word from Bethany.”

“Yeah, I’m aware of that.”

“It’s such a pity about Caleigh.”

“Mom, she’s a lesbian. And that was years ago.”

“I’m just saying. They still like each other so much.”

I think everyone’s a bit bisexual and it seems a pity to be strict about it if people get along. But I’m sure that’s naive. They’re all very sophisticated, my children, and quick to point out when I’m not.

“Did you see Mercury last night?” I ask. “It was such a clear sky here, and it was so bright. It’s closer to Earth than it’s been in thirty years, we should go out and look later, you probably don’t see it as well from the city. We’re supposed to get snow this evening but then it’s supposed to clear up. I was hoping we’d get out to the Allens on the twenty-seventh, they’ve invited all of us, and I know they’d like to see you. Drew’s back — I told you he’s engaged, didn’t I? They met in Peru on some kind of hiking expedition. Samantha’s her name. It’s all quite sudden, I think, but in any case, she’ll be there, too. You’d like to come, wouldn’t you?”

“Come where?”

“To the Allens’.”

“Maybe. I’ll have to see.”

Whenever she and Alec come home, no sooner do they get in the house than they’re on the phone making plans to be elsewhere, with friends. It’s been like that for years. There’s no use complaining, but then, they’re here so infrequently.

“Well, I know they’d like to see you.”

“What day is that? Our appointment is on Tuesday.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I told you I was going to make an appointment, and that’s when he could do it.”

“Well, I’d have liked to have known.”

She accelerates into the turn onto Garnet, tilting me toward the door.

“I didn’t think we had a big schedule,” she says.

It’s Celia’s idea — her professional estimation, I suppose — that the four of us should go and speak to someone together. I don’t have a huge amount to say, but if it helps the three of them, I have no objection. I will go along and receive my criticism. It’s just a shame it has to be straight after Christmas.

They’ve chosen the new restaurant down from the inn, and of course it’s far too expensive. Eight dollars for a salad. Sixteen for pasta. I could have made a perfectly good meal at home. There was no need to be lavish. Michael has no money for this kind of thing, which means it will be all the other two, and I can’t let them do that. A New Traditional Grill, it calls itself, oak banquettes gleaming under brass lights, the kitchen on display behind a glass barrier, not a stitch of fabric to absorb the diners’ voices rising over the music and clatter of pans.

Trying to be heard over the din, I tell the waitress I’ll have the soup, which produces a chorus of sighs.

“It’s your birthday!” Alec practically shouts.

“I had a big lunch. I’ll just have a bite of yours.”

The waitress and I exchange a smile. She seems like a friendly young woman.

“Order an entrée,” Alec instructs, “and we’ll get a bottle of wine. What kind of wine do you want?”

“A bottle?” I ask.

Michael rolls his head back on his shoulders, as if praying to the heavens, which he certainly isn’t.

“We’ll need another minute,” Celia says.

It’s so good to have them all here, and I don’t want to argue, but it makes no sense to order food I don’t want.

“You like fish,” Alec says. “Get the grouper.”

Eighteen dollars. He’s like his father: spending as if he has the natural right to live now as he plans to later.

“I’m fine. Maybe I’ll get a dessert.”

“You can’t make her eat,” Celia says with cool fixity.

“It’s dietary martyrdom,” Michael says. “It has a long pedigree.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just not that hungry. Let’s not spoil it, let’s just have our meal, can’t we?”

We reapply ourselves to the menus, the moment passes, and Michael asks Alec if he thinks he’s becoming identified with the white-male power structure now that he works for a national news magazine. “Purely at the level of the psychic,” Michael says, as if clarifying. “I’m not saying you’re a reactionary. As such.”

“I’m a researcher and I edit news summaries,” Alec says. “And my boss is a woman.”

“Right,” Michael says. “But is she a radical feminist?”

“She’s a features editor. She’s not radical about anything.”

When the waitress circles back to us, I’m allowed my soup.

“But would you say — again, at the level of the psychic — that the life-worlds of the people you work with are constituted at least in part through an identification with the structures of wealth and power they report on?”

“I’d say they’re underpaid and distracted, and most of them are political junkies.”

“I’m not talking about electoral politics.”

“Why? Because you think they’re irrelevant?”

“I wouldn’t say irrelevant. They’re obviously central to the fantasy of nationalism—”

“I’ll have the stuffed chicken,” Alec says.

“I told you Alice Jolly went to Vassar with your godmother, didn’t I?” I ask Alec, not certain if I remembered to or not. The three of them glance at me dumbfounded, as if braced for the outburst of some insane relative at Thanksgiving. “Alice Jolly, she’s married to Arthur Jolly, the man who edits your magazine. She went to Vassar with Ursula. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Michael says.

“I just thought it was quite a coincidence.”

“That’s precisely what it isn’t,” he says, at which point I give up.

As usual in such places, the portions are obscene. Michael’s pork chop could feed a village. My soup comes in a bowl a foot wide with an extra basket of bread I neither want nor need.

Alec consumes his food with something akin to lust, devouring it in minutes. His creaturely habits haven’t changed since he was a boy, though they are strained now through his more elaborate persona, which makes for a certain tension. It’s as though the fever of his adolescence never burned off, but he’s desperate not to show it. He wishes he were smoother, and tries hard to be. Which can make him brittle. Difficult not to think that it has something to do with his being gay. The effort to control people’s impressions of him.

He was only seventeen, still a boy, when he announced it to me, and yet he did it with such seriousness and finality. When I suggested he might want to keep an open mind, that people often go through phases, he asked if I’d said the same to Michael and Celia when it became obvious they were heterosexual. Which I obviously couldn’t say that I had. He seemed greatly satisfied by his rhetorical victory. I know better now than to tell him I worry about AIDS.

“So,” Celia says, “just so everyone’s been informed, we’ve got our appointment on Tuesday.”

“Is it with a Lacanian?” Michael asks.

“He does family therapy,” Celia says. “We’re not lying on couches and being told to leave after five minutes. We’re not doing theory.”

“Isn’t that what you studied?” I ask Celia.

“Mom, I have a degree in social work. Michael’s talking about literary criticism.”

“Not literary,” he says. “In fact, I think we need to move away from the text, into the realm of pure affect.”

“He’s a psychotherapist, okay? He’s going to talk to us about the dynamics that have built up over the years.”

“The dynamics,” I say.

“Patterns,” Celia says.

“Which are a bad thing?”

“If you don’t want to go,” she says to me, “you don’t have to.”

“No, no,” I say, not wanting to upset her. “I’m sure there are patterns. And no doubt they’re my fault.”

“Case in point,” Alec says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, eliciting another roll of the eyes, as if it’s too obvious to explain.

“No doubt I was a wretched parent,” I say. “And burdened you all with all sorts of things I shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, Mom, come on,” Michael says, “please.”

“What?” I say. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

Their expressions go blank with patience.

“I should have sold the house and moved us somewhere that doesn’t remind you all of the past. Somewhere you wanted to come back to more than twice a year.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” Alec says. “You like the house.”

He has always been the most protective of me, in his way. It’s been true since he was young. I remember walking with him when he was only five or six, holding his hand, and his looking up at me and saying very earnestly, “I would die so that you could live.” It was one of those preternatural utterances children sometimes make when they first glimpse that things don’t last forever. It has always stuck with me, though. He may have been a hyperactive child, and may still be stubborn and overexcitable, but his love is the simplest.

About the house, he’s right. It took time, but I am comfortable there now. My first instinct was to leave. The alarm would startle me awake in our bed each morning, and I’d think: He’s going to be late for work, you have to get him up. And then I’d see the unruffled covers beside me, and I would feel ill once more, as in that first moment—John. Never again. But you can’t sustain that sort of thing. It wears you out. Celia and Alec had high school to finish. Michael needed a place to come home to. When Alec left for college — Celia had instructed him to follow her example and apply only to institutions with need-blind admissions — and before Michael dropped out, I thought again about moving, wondering if being there on my own would be too much. But there were the things I liked. The quiet street, with no house opposite, just grass and trees running down to the path along the brook, and the fireplace, which I use most evenings in fall and winter, and the old sash windows like the ones I grew up with, and two healthy pear trees in the front yard.

For the longest time, I didn’t have the energy to do anything to the yard. But eventually I dug up the old beds that had gone to seed, and tilled a larger patch in the back for a garden. I cut off the lower branches of the trees that blocked out the sun, and took the evergreen bushes that had climbed up past the windowsills down to their stumps. The garden doesn’t amount to anything grand — daffodils, tulips, a few rosebushes, some tomatoes and herbs. But there’s satisfaction in it.

Alec, whose chicken is actually quite tasty, explains to Michael how a thirty-year mortgage works, speaking to him like a tutor incensed by the dimness of his charge. He’s trying to get through to his brother that I’m still paying for the house, and will be for years, which is why, he says, Michael can’t keep relying on me to pay his student loans for him.

“What business is that of yours?” Celia retorts, instinctively shielding Michael, who keeps his eyes on the table. “She can do whatever she wants to. You’re obsessed with money.”

I’m inclined to agree with her, but I don’t say so just now, as it seems unfair to Alec.

“I had an interview this week,” Michael interjects. This comes as a surprise. I’ve heard nothing of it. He usually tells me everything, in great detail. “It’s a record distributor. They’re not sure they have the money yet. She said she’d let me know soon.”

“That’s good,” Alec says, more softly now, chastened by the news.

He gets so frustrated with Michael. They think that I don’t see these things, that I’m distracted or exhausted. But I see them as clearly as when they were little, chasing each other around the octagonal house, shrieking in the yard, Alec forever wanting his brother’s attention. Most all of who they are now was there then. They trace themselves no further back than adolescence because that’s when they began getting their ideas. But so much of them has nothing to do with all that. They are their natures. Which they’d shout me down for saying.

For dessert, Michael is kind enough to split a berry tart with me; he leaves me most of the filling, and I leave him the crust.

When the bill arrives, I reach for it first, and am astounded by what I see. Michael and Alec had one beer each; there were three entrées, a soup, and two desserts. And yet you’d think we’d emptied the cellar and kitchen. When I dare to express my disbelief, they exhale in unison.

The trouble is that my direct deposit isn’t for two more days, and my checking account’s off because of Christmas. They should have just let me cook. Michael didn’t even finish his pork chop. I reach into my handbag and get out my credit card, but Alec says, “You’re not paying.”

“Don’t be silly, there’s no reason for you all to do this. It’s too much. Really, it is.”

He’s counting the bills Celia has handed him from her wallet. From his messenger bag, Michael produces a ten, which he holds out sheepishly to his brother. Alec takes it without looking up and adds it to the count, which Celia follows from across the table. He puts the cash in his wallet and clicks a Visa down against the bill, closing the plastic folder over it and sliding it to the edge of the table. I’m still holding my card out but he ignores it. I just can’t help wishing we’d gone somewhere less lavish. I appreciate their intention to treat me to something, but I’d honestly be more relaxed at home.

We wait in our own little zone of silence while the nice young waitress takes our bill to the register. A moment later she is at our shoulders again.

“So this got declined,” she says. “Did you want to try another card? Cash is fine too.”

“Yes, another card,” I say, holding mine up to her, but Alec has already snatched the bill and tells her we’ll need another minute. “Now come on,” I say, “don’t be ridiculous,” but he’s left the table, bill in hand, and is headed out the front door of the restaurant into the beginning of the snow.

“Of course,” I say to the other two, “there are perfectly nice places that aren’t quite so expensive as this.”

Celia shoots a glance at me in a clear warning of anger. She’s the only one who looks at me that way, who can wither me with my failings so easily. All I didn’t protect her from is right there on the surface still, in her shiny black eyes.

“It wasn’t my idea,” she says. “It was Alec’s.”

“Did he go to get cash?” Michael asks, as if he materialized at the table seconds ago and has no idea what is transpiring.

“Yes,” Celia says.

A woman at the door waiting to sit down with her family glares at us, as if our delay in paying were a purposeful goad to her. I look the other way, at a couple in their late fifties who are eating one table over with a young man in a blue blazer and a young pregnant woman who is either their daughter or daughter-in-law. By the horsey features she shares with the older woman, I’m guessing she’s the daughter. I noticed the husband earlier, when we came in, consulting with the waitress over the wine list. John was no expert, but he always chose the wine, and took great care in doing it, which I appreciated, making me old-fashioned, I’m sure.

Alec takes the bill straight to the cashier’s podium and disposes of it there. We gather our coats up and follow him into the parking lot.

The snowflakes are small and dry, floating like dandelion seeds over the tops of the cars. They haven’t begun to stick and are barely visible on the drive home, even looking for them as I do from the backseat, gazing over the darkened public school athletic fields, where only Celia did much playing, and into the yards of the houses, and across the lawn in front of the town hall, sights I take in now as I never do when driving by myself.

It’s inevitable, I suppose, that when they’re here I feel guilt for having dragged them back, knowing that they’d rather be getting on with their lives apart from me and this place, and yet their presence is such a comfort, the chance to be able at least to shelter and feed them, no matter how powerless I am to help them out in the world. Even their size is comforting, how they take up so much more space than they used to, their bodies warm and full, a good in themselves, not nearly so fleeting as all their worries.

I’ve vacuumed the house, tidied and dusted in the hopes Michael and Alec won’t be quite so affected by whatever it is in the air that bothers them. None of them seems to notice, but then they’ve just arrived so I suppose there’s no reason they should.

It’s Michael who resists the place the most, though he lives the closest and is here most often. It’s been true since we first moved here.

From the kitchen, I hear Alec sneeze, followed by the tap and release of Michael opening a bottle of beer. Celia’s bag knocks against the spindles as she climbs the staircase.

It’s only when they return and I see these rooms through their eyes that I realize how little of the inside I’ve changed. I did strip off the dried-grass wallpaper in the study and paint over the dining room’s drab green walls with a few coats of solid white, but most everything else I’ve left as it was: a watercolor landscape we were given as a wedding gift still hangs over the couch; the side tables I found decades ago at a stall in Chelsea sit on either side of it, supporting the fluted-glass lamps my parents gave us for our wedding, and which we had in our living room in Samoset. When they’re not around I see right through these objects, back to when the five of us were all together.

It’s late already, but if I go straight up for my bath, I’ll miss the chance to sit with them a little longer, so I fold the paper to the crossword and take a seat by the empty fireplace, waiting for them to settle.

Celia

Mom wheeled on us in the kitchen, crying, “No! No!”

We were getting cereal. The trussed turkey sat pale and bulbous on the counter behind her.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“An onion! I forgot to get an onion!”

Michael’s chest and shoulders crumpled forward in relief at the insignificance of the cause for this year’s Christmas-morning panic.

“We’ll get one,” I said.

“Where, for heaven’s sake!”

“The convenience store,” I said. “I’ll go after breakfast.”

“But the stuffing!” she said. “The stuffing!”

“It’s just an onion,” Michael pleaded, “it doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters!” she shouted, slapping her thigh.

“I thought we had some,” Alec said through the white surgical mask that he wore over his mouth and nose to protect himself from the atmosphere of the house. He pointed under the table, where a red mesh bag of sweet onions lay at the bottom of a terra-cotta planter beside the birdseed.

“Ah!” Mom called out. “Ah! Thank goodness! When did I get these? How silly.” She bent down, grabbed the bag, and reached for a pair of scissors to slash it open.

“Jesus,” Michael said, “that took a week off my life.”

“Please, Michael, stop exaggerating,” Mom said.

I carried my cereal bowl into the dining room. Alec, still in his bathrobe, had dashed ahead of me and already had the A section spread on the table in front of him. He lifted the beveled cone of his mask off his face in order to feed, leaving it resting on his forehead like a stunted horn. Paul’s footsteps padded above the ceiling. He’d gotten in the previous night and was up in my room getting dressed. The jet lag and mis-timed meals would throw off his blood sugar. He needed to eat soon.

“Is something the matter?” Aunt Penny said, appearing in the doorway. She had on her black wool pants and black turtleneck and black cardigan and gray shawl.

“No,” Alec said without looking up from the paper. “Everything’s fine.”

She put on her reading glasses and leaned in to examine the thermostat. “It’s arctic in here,” she said. “I don’t know how your mother survives — I have to turn it up.” She was acclimated to her New York apartment where the radiators ran so hot she had to keep windows open in January. She arrived each year with a suitcase full of woolens, girded for battle over the heat.

“Aren’t the two of you cold?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“Christ on a bike!” Michael exclaimed, entering the dining room with a mug of coffee and a palm full of pills. “Where did that come from?”

A tabby cat was rubbing its flank against the front radiator.

“Mom,” Alec said, lowering his mask over his mouth and nose, “there’s a cat in here.”

“It’s Nelly!” Mom said from the kitchen. “I let her in this morning. She’s Dorothy’s cat from next door, she’s perfectly sweet.”

Aunt Penny leaned down and began petting the creature. “She just wants to get warm like the rest of us, don’t you, kitty?”

“You’re eating?” Mom exclaimed, looking in on us in alarm. “What about the stockings?”

“Mom,” Michael said, “I’m trying to be an adult.”

“Oh, come on,” Mom said, in a sweet voice now. “I was up till midnight with them.”

There had been no interruption in the doing of stockings. We had done them every year of our lives. When the old felt tore, Mom sewed it back up again.

“Yes, we should do the stockings,” Aunt Penny agreed.

And so the three of us sat in a row on the couch in the living room and were handed our stuffed red stockings. In each of them were pencils, miniature bars of soap, Kit Kats, lip balm, mints, etc. Deodorant for Michael, a pair of earrings for me, dark chocolate for Alec, and always a clementine in the toe. Mom went into the closet in the other room and got us shoe boxes to put our little presents in. We thanked her for each item as we opened it. She looked on, smiling, saying they were nothing much, just things we might use, or that she knew we liked.

“Oh, there you are,” Aunt Penny said when Paul entered the living room, sleepy-eyed in his button-down, V-neck sweater, and corduroys, grinning at the sight of the three of us lined up like toddlers.

We had been set to fly together. But the night before, he had changed his mind. He wanted the two days to write, he said. An unimpeachable excuse, given that I was asking him to sacrifice far more time than that so I could leave my job. Impossible to argue with. But also a dare. Because was I really supposed to believe that his suddenly holding back on coming to be with my family had nothing at all to do with my telling him ten days ago that I was pregnant? Nothing to do with the fact that he’d barely said a word about it since? But it was late, and I was packing — I didn’t want to take the dare and open everything up hours before I left.

At least now he was here more willingly. I could tell that much from his relaxed expression, the kind he had after a productive day at the desk, his baseline tension alleviated for an evening. He’d had his two days to himself. He had made his point, if that’s what it was. Now he was happy enough to go along with the festivities, to accept my aunt’s approval of him as a handsome, marriageable prospect, to laugh with Michael and Alec, and laugh at them, settling himself at a mildly ironic distance from the goings-on. I’d wanted him to step between the others and give me a kiss good morning, but he took a seat by the window, watching us from there.

“Oh, it’s The Messiah,” Mom said, and bolted out of her chair to turn up the radio. “King’s College,” she added, “they’re broadcasting it live.” She told us this every year with the same note of excitement. Behind her, in the window, hung the Venetian Advent calendar that used to belong to one of us when we were little, and which she still opened a window of each morning until we arrived, when she said that one of us should do it, for the fun of it.

After stockings, we ate the ritual coffee cake and bacon. Then it was back to the living room for the presents from under the tree. Mom dashed to and fro as we opened gifts, basting the bird, pulling out the good plates, getting the silver from the cupboard. Aunt Penny supplied us with our annual sweaters, hats, gloves, and scarves. Alec complained that he was wheezing despite his mask. It wasn’t the cat, he said, it was the mold in the basement. Its spores were everywhere.

Michael’s presents to each of us were compilation CDs he’d burned, Mahler for Aunt Penny, Ella Fitzgerald for my mother, what we ought to be listening to for Alec and me, and a concessionary alt-rock mix for Paul. He did his best to pay attention as we each opened them, but kept circling back into the front hall, to the telephone, willing it to ring, willing Bethany to call. She had eventually offered some excuse for her failure to appear after that night he’d been on the verge of leaving his apartment to seek her out, and they had been seeing each other since, though with enough ambiguity on her part as to their status to leave Michael perpetually on edge. Now she’d gone back to Cleveland and hadn’t contacted him in four days, having forbidden him to call her there, given the wrath it might incur from her parents. And once again, he was tortured by her silence.

Soon everyone but Paul and Michael had joined the struggle in the kitchen. Each time my mother opened the oven, Aunt Penny hovered at her side, asking if the juices were running clear, because if they weren’t it could be quite dangerous. When the time came, Alec mashed the potatoes, and I sautéed the beans with almonds, and prepped my annual pecan pie. In the final stages, Mom cursed what a furnace the house had become, and threw the back door wide open as Aunt Penny looked on, aghast.

By dusk it was over and Michael had set to work on the dishes. I told Paul I wanted to go for a walk and he consented. The cold air woke me almost immediately from the stupor of the house. I sensed the numbness lifting. I wanted him to put his arm around me, but he walked a few feet away. The ice on the street and the snow in the yards were blue in the fading light. There were no cars out. No sound that wasn’t absorbed by the snow. I reached over and took his gloved hand in mine.

“So what do you think?” I said. “Do you think maybe we should talk?”

“Now?” he asked.

As if my pregnancy had been suspended for the holiday.

“It is that unpleasant? Just to talk about it?”

“No,” he said, as though fending off the suggestion that he was being evasive.

Neither of us had anticipated this and we certainly hadn’t planned it. My diaphragm had always worked before. I was still adjusting to the fact myself. While I hadn’t pictured him being over the moon with excitement, I’d imagined it might be the cause for at least a bit of wonder at the prospect. At least a little speculation. Instead, it seemed he’d decided to bide his time until I announced I was having an abortion. Which wasn’t illogical. I didn’t want to stay home with a baby. He couldn’t afford to support us even if I did. There wasn’t room for a child right now, not with what we were each pursuing.

“I don’t know,” he said, slipping his hand from mine. “I guess — I mean — you haven’t said much about it. I don’t even really know what you’re thinking. Maybe I don’t want to sway you.”

“Well, saying nothing makes it seem pretty obvious what you want, doesn’t it?”

His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his peacoat, his shoulders hunched forward. In these passive moments of his, he seemed more like a third brother to me than a boyfriend. Someone to be tended. Even now, in the face of this thing affecting me so much more than him, somehow he was the subject of it all.

We kept going, through what was now nearly darkness, past the black-and-white Colonials, the little Capes hunkered in the snow, the stucco semi-mansion with its drawn shades. I almost never saw lights on here, or people out in their driveways. The neighborhood seemed an abandoned place even when populated. I would never live here again, nor anywhere like it.

I started crying. It had been like this for a couple of weeks now. Tears welling up out of nowhere and running down my cheeks, as if I were a glass filled to the brim, spilling at the slightest motion. I resented the condition: my aching breasts, the stench of food, the back pain and cramping. Paul was fretting over lost freedom in some imagined future, while my body was stealing my mind.

The waterworks brought him to my side again. He put his arm around me, and I leaned in against his chest, furious at needing him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have brought it up. It just seemed like you were ignoring it, too.”

“I can’t ignore it.”

“I know, I’m just saying, it’s not like I can really believe it’s my choice, even if I did want a kid, and maybe I do, I don’t know. But what difference would that make? I’m not the one in charge.”

“What does that mean?” I said, standing upright again, away from him.

“What choice do I have? In this, or working more again, or anything that affects our whole lives? If I love you, I have to agree with you. That’s the way it’s always been. I can see it in Alec. He’s the same way. He thinks he isn’t in control, but he’s controlling everything.”

“That’s a cop-out. It’s bullshit. You think I’m asking you to have a kid? I’m sorry I got pregnant, but I didn’t do it alone.”

“I really don’t want to fight,” he said.

“After telling me I’m controlling your whole life.” We’d stopped in the middle of the empty street, facing each other. “Were you being controlled having every morning to yourself while I went to work? Really?”

“No,” he said, “I’m grateful. I’ve told you that.”

He had that set look to his face, as if battening down the hatches for some storm of irrationality. In the last three years, being with Paul had allowed me the beginnings of sympathy for my mother. I’d always defended my father in front of her, my father who never wanted to fight. I’d defended him because he seemed weak. But was I supposed to do that again? To defend Paul from myself? All couples have arguments. That’s how Mom used to explain away her shouting. The difference being that there was no child of mine to hear this. And perhaps there never would be.

“I don’t want to argue either,” I said. “But I was sick again this morning. You’re not the only one not sleeping much right now. I haven’t told anyone about this except you. So we need to talk. And not next week, or next month.”

“I get it,” he insisted, eager, now that I had cornered him, to agree and move on.

Over his shoulder stood the mock-Tudor house my old friend Jill Brantley used to live in with her divorced mother, where she and I used to get high in the attic, like an after-school special about wayward girls and the telltale signs of delinquency. This street — this whole town — was so familiar that I looked straight through it, as if it were no longer a place unto itself but merely an opening onto the past. And holding off the tidal pull of that earlier time, preventing my getting drawn back into the house we had just left, into the family and all its repetitions, was Paul — a separate person, who had never existed here. Unimplicated. Living in the present. Aggravating and noncompliant, but attentive and affectionate, too. Who seemed to keep wanting to be with me.

“We’ll discuss it all tomorrow,” he said. “I promise. Can we be okay for now?” he said, his eyes gently pleading.

He stepped forward and hugged me, without my asking.

What choice did I have but to believe him?

As we were taking off our boots and jackets in the front hall, Alec swept by flashing widened eyes above his mask in a silent warning of drama. It turned out that Michael, in our absence, had broken down and called Bethany’s parents’ house. Her father had answered. Michael had asked to speak to Bethany. She had come to the phone and told him he was making everything worse. And then she’d told him that it was over. That they could never speak again.

“Maybe you could go up,” Mom said to me. “He’s in his room.”

“You couldn’t stop him?”

“There’s no need to shout,” she said. “We were just here reading. He used the other phone.”

We’d been in the house together, all of us, for nearly three days. I’d left for twenty minutes. Quickly absenting himself from the situation, Paul collected his novel from the coffee table and retreated to the wingback chair at the far end of the living room.

“She never did sound terribly suitable,” Aunt Penny said, standing over the fire with the iron poker.

I found Alec in the kitchen, vacuuming up a tin of chocolate chip cookies, as though we hadn’t already had two desserts.

“What?” he said. “I’m hungry.”

“So he just went up without telling anyone, and called her?”

“Basically. He was practically keening afterwards and Mom lost it, started yelling at him. Saying he was being melodramatic. She can’t handle it when he gets like that. You may have noticed this,” he said, “over the years.”

Upstairs, I listened for a moment before knocking on the door.

“Yeah?” Michael called out in a tremulous voice, as if he’d been locked in there for months, and I were the jailer come to free him.

He was sitting upright on the bed, in the dim lamplight. Crates of records that he didn’t have space for in his room at Ben’s sat in the shadowed corners. The harder up he got for money, the more Alec pressed him to sell some of his vinyl. But no matter what bills he had to pay, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The records meant too much to him. The most valuable were the white labels and test presses of the artists who’d gone on to fame, a few with the help of Michael’s early reviews. But these in particular he held on to, especially if he thought the artists had sold out down the line. He refused to profit from what he judged to be corporate hype, as if by retaining the better work he could preserve its integrity. I didn’t blame him for this the way Alec did. I sympathized with the urge to dissent, in whatever small way, from monetizing everything. As Michael saw it, capitalism had been cruel to our father, giving him no quarter when he was down, the weight of no money and too much responsibility dragging him under. Which didn’t mean he hadn’t been sick, but that there had been no margin for being sick. I didn’t disagree. But I wished Michael could fathom how furious it made him. He seemed blind to his own anger, willfully so. On the few occasions I’d suggested as much, he’d tilted his head to one side and looked at me quizzically, as if I were describing something wholly alien.

“I have to go out there,” he said. “I have to see her. I could fly to Cleveland tomorrow. She’s just saying we can’t talk because her parents are telling her to. If I see her, it’ll be okay.”

On his lap he held open a half sheet of wrinkled notepaper.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s her last voice mail to me before she left. I transcribed it. Do you want to hear it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

Beneath his guilelessness, knowingly or not, lay the accusation that if I didn’t listen I too would be abandoning him. This was the disavowal: he could remain innocent of his rage as long as he found a way, however indirect, to channel it through us. “Because you’re fixated,” I said. “You don’t talk about anything else. She’s immature. She manipulates you. I get that you’re upset. But you can’t give your whole life over to her.”

“I can’t help it, I have no choice.”

I could have argued the impossibility of the fantasy, but then out would come the Proust quotes and the diatribes against passionless domesticity. Love was an affliction or nothing at all. In which case, Paul and I were nothing. I had given up years ago on being able to share with Michael what I myself went through day to day trying to be with another person, to ease my flinching against Paul’s expressions of love, convinced that what they promised would never last, would vanish without warning and cut me back down to the truth of loneliness. Telling Michael I was pregnant and uncertain what to do? Forget it. His fumbling, anxious response would be worse than his continued ignorance, and would only require me to assure him that I was okay.

He went on about Cleveland, not quite as if I hadn’t spoken, but as if it made no difference, talking as much to himself as to me about how he could get a cab at the airport that would take him to a motel, and how from there he could take a bus to wherever Bethany eventually agreed to meet him, spooling out the line of reasoning he would use to persuade her that they had to be together, that nothing else mattered. He sounded like a child insisting on the existence of an imaginary world.

This time, when he finished, or at least paused, I had nothing left in me to add.

“Everyone’s in the living room,” I said. “You should come down. We could watch a movie.”

“What if I’m alone for the rest of my life?” he asked.

I looked away, down at his feet, at his blue Converse sneakers on the old pine-green carpet. I used to come to this room sometimes, after Michael had returned to England and I was alone in the house trying to take care of Alec and my mother. It was the farthest away I could get and still be home. Michael didn’t tell me until years later about his premonition in the woods, the one that had driven him to leave. Back then it just seemed he had picked the perfect time to be gone.

I knew by training that my own estimation of how a person would end up in life wasn’t the germane thing. Besides, I didn’t know how things were going to turn out for Michael. I couldn’t predict the future. As a counselor, my job was to make room for fears to be aired, so they could dissolve. That was the professional thing to do. And the kind thing. I was closer now than ever to treating Michael that way, as a case, cutting off what remained of brother-and-sister. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t kill him like that. For his sake, and for mine.

“You’re not going to be alone,” I said. “There are lots of women who’ve been attracted to you. You’ll find someone.”

He scanned the note in his hand once more, then folded it up and slipped it into his pocket.

“We could talk about it — at our appointment,” I said. “It might be good for all of us.”

He seemed to brighten slightly at the idea. “That would be okay?” he asked.

“It’s whatever we want it to be. Each of us.”

“Oh,” he said, “okay.” He reached for his beer on the bedside table. “Thanks for coming up,” he said.

In the living room, Alec was watching a rerun of Brideshead Revisited. A young Jeremy Irons ate strawberries under a tree with a blond aristocrat. Mom looked up now and then from her crossword to see how far along the story had progressed. Her gift to her sister this year had been a volume of the Mitford sisters’ correspondence, which Aunt Penny perused now by the fire, her legs covered by a blanket. Paul, slouching on the sofa, was still trekking through his Dostoyevsky, the book in one hand, a glass of Scotch in the other.

The family at its leisure.

“Is he all right?” Mom asked, adding without waiting for an answer, “I’m so glad you talked with him. It’s all so unpleasant.”

“He’s not great,” I said.

“Is this the Indian girl?” Aunt Penny asked.

“No,” Alec said, louder than necessary, and without turning from the screen. “She’s African-American and has borderline personality disorder.”

“Oh, come on now, who said that?” Mom asked.

“I think she did,” Alec said.

“Aren’t there any women his own age?” Aunt Penny asked. “Women he went to college with?”

“The mixer stage is over,” Alec said.

“There’s no need to be snide,” my mother said.

“I’m not. It’s over for all of us. Believe me.”

Paul laughed, but stopped short when he realized no one had joined him.

“Well,” my mother said, standing up to gather her things before going upstairs for her bath, “hopefully he’ll sleep well tonight, and be better in the morning.”

On her way out of the room, she stole a glance at her sister, and, confident she wasn’t watching, turned the thermostat ever so slightly down. I lowered myself into the armchair she’d vacated and my body collapsed into the springs.

After a few blank minutes, Aunt Penny rose as well, saying she needed to begin preparing herself for “the conditions upstairs.” She too stopped at the thermostat on the way out, turning it slightly up.

“You people are crazy,” Paul said.

“Thanks,” I replied, glad for the assist. Having made his promise earlier, he’d happily resumed his role as passive observer. Sensing my displeasure, he decided to bow out, saying he was going to read in bed and would see me shortly.

That left Alec and me sitting by the dwindling fire. He’d switched off the television and turned the wingback in toward the room again.

“How are you holding up?” he asked.

“I can’t talk to you with that mask on. It’s ridiculous.”

“You’re not allergic to the house.”

“Neither are you. Just take it off, would you?”

He lifted it onto his forehead, sniffing at the air like a badger. At least he didn’t wear Dad’s cravats anymore, like he had in high school, with the woolen pants and the cardigans, that fustian look he’d cultivated to appear more mature than he was. I could never bring myself to tell him that it just made him look gay. It would have been cruel at the time, when the clothes gave him a means to feel superior. Now he wore formfitting pullovers and aged denim, which also made him look gay, though in a more competitive vein.

“Mom’s retirement isn’t secure,” he said.

“What the fuck are you talking about? She hasn’t retired.”

“That’s not what retirement security means. What I’m saying is, she is going to retire in the next five years, and when she does, her income stream will be just enough to pay her bills, but without a cushion. And she’ll still be paying a mortgage. That is an insecure retirement.”

“I can’t talk about this. I just can’t.”

“Which allies you with her, because that’s exactly what she says when I bring it up. It’s like no one wants to even acknowledge the future. Which leaves me to worry about it.”

“We should have gone to the movies,” I said. “Why didn’t we go to the movies?”

Alec picked at his nose, the tag of his new sweater dangling from his wrist like a cheap ornament. I had trained him from late adolescence in basic psychological literacy and so was able to talk with him about more or less anything, including, over the years, the ups and downs of my relationships. All in all, we were about as close as siblings could be. Which meant we monitored each other’s responsibility for the family, watchful for any sign of defection, as though we were on a desert island together, each surreptitiously building an escape raft that the other occasionally burned. My cardinal sin was having boyfriends to begin with, because God forbid another family unit arose to threaten the hegemony of the dying colony. His was being younger, and so having required my taking care of him when there was no one else to do it, putting him in the hole, in terms of time served. Now, belatedly, he’d set himself up as the family actuary. It was his attempt to engage at the lowest emotional cost.

Realizing he would get no traction from me on Mom’s retirement, he tacked back to Michael, letting me know that Ben had informed him that our brother hadn’t paid his rent this month. Michael had been living with Ben, and then Ben and Christine together, for years by now, in an arrangement that had morphed from a stopgap measure in the wake of his breakup with Caleigh into the most constant aspect of his adult life, all, needless to say, without any planning or discussion. Jobs, doctors, romantic crises had come and gone, but throughout he’d remained in that little front bedroom facing Shawmut Avenue on the edge of the South End. I’d long been glad for it because, while it might have overstated the case to call Michael their ward, Ben and Christine had kept him on as a member of their domestic establishment, giving him the daily contact and occasional home-cooked meal he’d otherwise be without. That Alec remained close to them both provided a kind of collective, monitoring intelligence, for better or worse.

“But surprise, surprise,” Alec said, “Ben gets a check in the mail from…Mom. So it’s not just his student loans now, it’s his rent. And there’s no way she can afford to keep doing that. But whatever! I guess everyone’s happy just drifting along.”

I zoned out for a bit to the embers of the logs, and he quit his yapping. But only for so long.

“Did I tell you about my trip up here, about the guy who cruised me?”

I shook my head.

“This guy next to me totally cruised me. Seriously. He gave me a blow job in the parking lot at 128. We exchanged, like, three words.”

“That’s gross.”

“Oh my God,” he said. “You are so homophobic.”

“Oh, please. He could have murdered you.”

“And that makes it gross?”

“It’s just a little extreme,” I said. “Like maybe you’re acting out.”

“I thought you worked with Bay Area homeless kids. How is this extreme?”

“You don’t prostitute yourself to pay your rent.”

“That may change,” he said.

“Whatever. My point is, is this really what you want to be engaging in? Wouldn’t you rather have a boyfriend?”

He gaped at me, incredulous. In my exhaustion I had walked right into it — the blithe demonstration of my heterosexual privilege in suggesting such a thing was so readily had, when I knew well enough that it wasn’t. But here he was, attractive and articulate and employed, and I didn’t get why he couldn’t find someone else like that in all of New York City. It was half the reason he’d moved there. So why was he exposing himself to these random encounters?

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I take it, then, you’re not seeing anyone at the moment?”

“No,” he said, fiddling with his cuticles.

“Could you stop that picking?” I said.

“Okay — something is clearly up with you. What is it? Paul?”

“No. I’m pregnant.”

He glanced from his hands straight into my eyes, testing my sincerity. When he realized it was true, his mouth fell open. “You’re shitting me,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Are you saying you might have a child?”

“Well, I’m not going to have a deer. You say child like it’s a disease. You sound like Michael.”

“Okay, let’s just say, that would be a game changer. Procreation?”

Seeing his reaction, I felt almost giddy, as if all of a sudden my escape vessel was complete, and I’d made it out onto the open water, free at last. What better veto of filial duty than an infant?

Officially, Alec and I were no longer competitive. To be explicit about it would seem petty. But it still squirreled its way into moments like this, when the battle became primal again, and we struggled, pulling each other together because that’s what we’d always done to get through, and pushing each other away to convince ourselves over and over that we were more than just functions of a loss.

“I haven’t decided,” I said, generously, not wanting to scare him any further. “But who knows? Maybe it would be good for all of us. You’re the one saying we don’t think enough about the future.”

This took him a moment to digest.

On the table beside him, next to the fluted lamp with the hexagonal shade of waterfowl, the picture of a younger Dad stared from behind the glass of a studio portrait. He must have had it done for some business venture. Mom had found it in his papers and had it framed. We didn’t do family photographs on the mantelpiece or the walls. This was the only one. It occurred to me in a way it hadn’t before that my father would have liked Paul. They would have gotten along. Paul would have been able to reassure him that he was a reliable person, trustworthy, an observer of the social contract. Nothing awkward would have arisen. If Dad had been well enough to focus on the fact long enough, he would have been politely happy at news of a grandchild.

“Well, that is a stunner,” Alec said.

He had ceased his fidgeting, oblivious to the dull horn of his mask that still poked from his forehead. The house had gone quiet around us.

“I love you,” he said. “For whatever it’s worth.”

Michael

AFTER-ACTION REPORT

Operation Family Therapy

Mission: Enhanced communication / familial well-being

Outcome: Pending

1. After taking cannon fire from a beached dreadnought on Mass. Ave. two klicks east of Central Square (allegiance and origin unknown), Mom continued to operate our down-armored Honda at below regulation speed and ordered the commencement of a routine park-and-destroy mission. The entire unit was placed on alert. Multiple initial space sightings proved false. We tacked south into Cambridgeport, keeping to side streets. Weather was hibernal. Birds were occasional. Eighteen minutes out from rendezvous a viable space was ID’d in front of a deli. Mom was skeptical but maneuvered the vehicle into position. As she shifted into reverse, a VW sedan driven by an irregular nosed into the designated space behind us. Mom immediately launched a DEFCON 1 verbal barrage, which backfired against the closed windows, causing multiple casualties. Celia was swiftly medevaced to Ramstein Air Base for a laparoscopic frontal-lobe transplant and returned to active duty four minutes later. Others ran for psychic cover only to find the terrain on fire. Fog of war. Following the skirmish, tensions in the little platoon rose. Trying to regroup, Alec commenced a psyop designed to convince Mom that an open stretch of curb downwind of a laundromat ended more than twelve feet from the adjacent hydrant. The operation failed. Mom ordered a higher alert. Celia observed that we had been on one for a decade. Eleven minutes out, Alec suggested we consider PAYING for a garage space. At this point, command and control began to break down. Mom hissed aloud, Who are all these people? I suggested they might be people who lived in the neighborhood. Seven minutes to rendezvous, after Mom had threatened to drop us off and go on alone, an enemy sport-utility vehicle bearing a Dole/Kemp sticker vacated a meter in front of Crate and Barrel. Alec leapt from the vehicle to secure the perimeter and Mom backed our transport into the slot.

2. Unit reached the training facility on time. Decor was South by Southwest (Naugahyde couch, Sierra throw). Vaginal imagery detected in wall hangings. Waiting room ransacked for war loot; none found. I suggested that Mom read

Field and Stream

to kill the additional minute and thirty seconds. Mom nonresponsive. Mortar fire heard from the direction of the Charles River; presumed friendly. Five minutes after scheduled rendezvous, a woman uniformed in Geiger jacket and pearls, presumed hostile, exited the training office with no visible wounds. Engaging unilaterally, Alec kneecapped her with a bronze Navajo sculpture. Body stored in closet. Mustachioed training officer, balding, presumed neutral, then escorted the unit into a semicircle of modernist sitting furniture. Coffee table, presumed original, bore a leather, presumed Naugahyde, box of Kleenex. Unit ID’d itself by rank and serial number. Training officer’s diplomas were too far away to make out; presumed valid. Training officer, smiling, introduced himself and asked us to call him Gus. Silence. Gus requested a report from each member of the unit regarding what we considered our mission to be. Rear Admiral Celia appeared depressed and drained in these opening minutes of the engagement. PTSD from park-and-destroy mission not to be ruled out.

3. She nonetheless reported out her sense of our situation: (1) unit cohesion, and affect of individual soldiers (me), still questionable years after resignation of the co-commander. Elephant still in the room. Ghost still in the basement; (2) retraining required to improve overall performance. Alec generally concurred. Mom said something about having nothing against talking. In an effort to get her to elaborate, Gus referred to Dad as her “life partner.” Man, was that a mistake. The phrase grated violently on the brain of the unit, causing instant suspicion that the training officer might be a New Age — language infectee, thus unable to survive Mom’s judgment and impotent to assist us. Gus asked what was so funny. It’s nothing, Mom said, it’s just that I would never refer to John that way.

4. Mom ordered by Gus to Reeducation Camp Worcester to meet disciplinary standards for therapeutic self-description. Junior members of the unit did not object. Countermanding the instruction, however, Mom ordered a cruise-missile strike from the USS

Passive Disdain,

a destroyer under her command presently operating in the waters off Cape Cod. Camp Worcester reported leveled.

5. Adult acne became general. Scattered reports of giardia, stress fractures, and hair loss.

6. During initial interrogation, Alec informed Gus that he was gay. Celia responded by observing that we were here to discuss things we didn’t already know. Resulting friendly fire caused minor damage to decor and fenestration. Mom seen wincing at loss of family privacy. Gus asked if Alec had anything he wanted to say to the family as a whole on this subject. The PFC reported that, yes, in fact, he had kept much of his struggle to himself, in tacit deference to the hierarchy in which Dad’s resignation still ranked above all other battle wounds.

7. Records indicated that the little wheezer had come out to Subcomandante Celia first, somewhere back during the Opium War of his middle adolescence. According to later reporting, he had suggested to her he would end up a closet case in light of his ambition to join the Senate (may he be forgiven). Second up was his reveal to Mom (a conversation about which the less imagined the better). Only after he had gone to college did he bring it up with me. I was driving us to the cineplex one summer evening in the Cutlass. He asked if I had met anyone at BC, and if Caleigh was my girlfriend. This came as a surprise, given that he and I never talked about such things, his being his larval, stripling self — boy pretender to the empty throne — and my being generally ashamed. He was single, he said, knuckling bravely through the awkwardness of talking with me about it. And it turned out, he said, looking away from me and out his window, that he was attracted to men. We had just passed the house of one of his high school friends, a precocious fan of Stüssy gear, pretty in a Duran Duran sort of way, whom I remembered him being particularly fond of, and I was saddened at the thought of the little fidget-buster being lonely. I told him that I approved of homosexuality as a counter-hegemonic subject position. That it constituted one of the key sites of resistance to patriarchy, and should be understood as a revolutionary stance. In retrospect, I could have used a more personal touch. He might have wanted something more from me, given the absence of the father function.

8. Moving on, Gus noted that I had yet to describe my own sense of the unit’s mission. Searching for cover, I found none. The night before, after Commodore Celia had granted me leave to discuss Bethany in our session, I had stayed in my old room listening to her favorite Aphex Twin tracks, and trying to read a little Althusser. After repeated tries, Caleigh finally answered the phone at her parents’ house, where she’d gone for Christmas. To my disappointment, her instructions were to heed Celia’s advice: own up already to the hollowness of the salvific fantasy of romance, to its childishness. And take to heart what Celia kept implying: that my lamentation was misplaced, that the loss of Bethany was a stand-in for the older grief, a loss I was bound to repeat until I let its real object surface. This, of course, was a Freudianism straight out of basic training, and a principle I readily accepted. The problem being that basic training had so little to do with actual combat. My intellectual grasp of my situation never seemed to hold much. Life kept slipping through it. And in life, I needed Bethany. Because she could let me love her now, in the present. And even if doctrine held that this love wouldn’t give me back everything I’d lost, what if it did? After Caleigh tired of my resistance, and we said good night, I took my meds and fell into a dream-soaked slumber. I found myself at an auction. A stage, or block, had been erected at the back of a Christian Dior boutique in old Charleston. There, up on the platform, naked and glistening in the spotlight, was Bethany. Some bidders snapped photographs. Others stepped close to appraise the tone of her muscles. White women in beautifully cut dresses made disparaging remarks about the condition of her hair. Meanwhile, on the wall behind her, between two glass display cases of couture gowns, blood ran from the palms of a High Gothic Jesus, skeletal and pale. No one seemed to notice him. I tried taking suits from the rack to cover Bethany, to shelter her from the eyes of the crowd, but the saleswoman told me I had to purchase the merchandise before using it. At which point a hole opened in my chest, and I vomited into the hole, the hot liquid circulating back up through my heart and neck into my head. Bethany crumpled to her knees by the footlights, bowed and silent. All I could do was stand there, failing to save her.

9. Deciding it might be best to skip my dream sequence, I told Gus I concurred with Celia. Airing the effects of the past was long overdue. As Marx tells us, the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brains of the living. I was all for the discussion of transgenerational haunting. It was just hard to focus at the moment owing to a woman in Ohio I needed to visit.

10. Executing an ingratiation maneuver with a bit of quick jocularity, training officer deployed the phrase

girlfriend trouble

Tower of Babel. No interpreters in sight. I could sooner have crafted an origami hare from the gold wafer of his melted wedding band than communicate how completely he had misapprehended me.

Girlfriend trouble?

Those pesky ladies it’s so hard to keep from bitching at you? Training officer’s feminism missing and presumed dead.

11. After thanking us for sharing, Gus briefed us on the rules of engagement: This was not a free-fire zone, we were to limit collateral damage, and leave no one behind. That understood, what, he wanted to know, were present conditions? Mom reported that she was just glad to have us all home. And that she wished I didn’t have to take so many pills. So that was helpful. Also, she had noticed that Gus had graduated from Bowdoin, and wondered if he had studied with Maureen Durant-Draper, the archaeologist, who had been a classmate of hers at Smith. She’s done a lot of work on Constantinople, Mom said, I don’t know if you ever came across her? Junior ranks of the unit slumped, defeated, in their chairs. As you can see, Mom said to Gus, my children are fond of being exasperated. Gus turned to the grunts to ask what bothered us about the mother ship’s inquiry. I’m supposed to be more serious, Mom said, answering for us. But we’re not here to talk about me, she went on, it’s what

they

have to say that’s important.

12. Seeing the operation going sideways, Celia redirected us to the core mission. Conversation ensued regarding the long half-life of Dad. I had no objection to this other than my virtually blank memory of him as a person. That Mom should remember her husband made sense. But why Celia and even Alec the Younger should have such vivid recall of him while I, who knew him longest, have trouble even picturing his face I couldn’t rightly say. The three of them proceeded to be moved by painful memories. Listening to them was mesmerizing. They cried like they had that afternoon I returned from England to Walcott with Peter Lorian, after Dad died, and I had watched them leaning against each other on the couch in the living room, their grief seemingly intensified at the sight of me. Hearing their collective weeping again in Gus’s office, I thought that in the force of their feelings there might be a way back for me. Into the time before I fled the house, before I left them there, blind to the coming evil that I alone had seen. A chance to somehow repent for my cowardice by joining them now. And yet as mesmerizing as their emotion was, it reached me like the sound of a record played low in another room, a world of meaning beckoning me to a closed door.

13. If I had just woken up earlier that morning, Alec was saying to Gus, I could have spoken to Dad, and maybe he wouldn’t have left. Dear, Mom said, you can’t think like that. And then without warning, Alec was speaking about me, saying how much he worried about my life, how he wished things could be easier for me, and Celia was silently agreeing with him, rocking her whole body back and forth, biting her lower lip, trying not to cry again. Mom put her hand on my knee. It’s hard for Michael, she explained to Gus. And it’s hard for us to know what to do. Gus looked across the coffee table at me. They seem very concerned about you, he said. How does that feel?

14. There is a point in all wars of attrition when the combatants begin to suspect that their purpose is not at all what they believed it to be, that in fact the war is its own organism, of which they are merely the cells, and that its sole drive is to go on forever. Depending on the hour, the insight either maddens or clarifies, sending you into despair, or clearing your vision by releasing you from the bonds of hope.

15. Time had fled. Our session was ending. In his concluding remarks, Gus appeared genuinely excited at the complexity of the unit’s issues. He said there was a lot to work with, and that his office stood ready to complete the retraining if we were willing and able. Afterwards, we went to a Japanese restaurant. Mom asked us what sashimi was. I drank pilsners. The order to stand down was never given. Later, under cover of darkness, we commenced our retreat.