The Goldfinch

I had found a piece of wood that looked like a good match for the broken piece, and I slid it over to him. “Did you have bad grades?”

“No—I did all right,” he said, picking up the wood and holding it to the light, then putting it in the stack with possible matches. “The thing was, he hadn’t gone to college himself and he’d done fine, hadn’t he? Did I think I was better than him? But more than that—well, he was the kind of man who had to bully everyone around him, you know the type, and I think it must have dawned on him, what better way to keep me under his thumb and working for free? At first—” he deliberated several moments over another piece of veneer, then put it in the maybe pile—“at first he told me I’d have to take a year off—four years, five, however long it took—and earn the rest of my college money the hard way. Never saw a penny I made. I lived at home, and he was putting it all into a special account, you see, for my own good. Rough enough but fair, I thought. But then—after I’d worked full-time for him for about three years—the game changed. Suddenly—” he laughed—“well, hadn’t I understood the deal? I was paying him back for my first two years of college. He hadn’t set aside anything at all.”

“That’s awful!” I said, after a shocked pause. I didn’t see how he could laugh about something so unfair.

“Well—” he rolled his eyes—“I was still a bit green, but I realized at that rate I’d be perishing of old age before I ever got out of there. But—no money, nowhere to live—what was I to do? I was trying hard to figure something out when lo and behold, Welty happened into the office one day while my father was going off at me. He loved to berate me in front of his men, my dad—swaggering around like a Mafia boss, saying I owed him money for this and that, taking it out of my quote unquote ‘salary.’ Withholding my alleged paycheck for some imaginary infraction. That kind of thing.

“Welty—it wasn’t the first time I’d seen him. He’d been in the office to arrange for shipping from estate sales—he always claimed that with his back he had to work harder to make a good impression, make people see past the deformity and all that, but I liked him from the start. Most people did—my father even, who shall I say wasn’t a man who took kindly to people. At any rate, Welty, having witnessed this outburst, telephoned my father the next day and said he could use my help packing the furniture for a house he’d bought the contents of. I was a big strong kid, hard worker, just the ticket. Well—” Hobie stood and stretched his arms over his head—“Welty was a good customer. And my father, for whatever reason, said yes.

“The house I helped him pack was the old De Peyster mansion. And as it happened I’d known old Mrs. De Peyster quite well. From the time I was a kid I’d liked to wander down and visit her—funny old woman in a bright yellow wig, font of information, papers everywhere, knew everything about local history, incredibly entertaining storyteller—anyway, it was quite a house, packed with Tiffany glass and some very good furniture from the 1800s, and I was able to help with the provenance of a lot of the pieces, better than Mrs. De Peyster’s daughter, who hadn’t the slightest interest in the chair President McKinley had sat in or any of that.

“The day I finished helping him with the house—it was about six o’clock in the afternoon, I was head-to-toe with dust—Welty opened a bottle of wine and we sat around on the packing cases and drank it, you know, bare floors and that empty house echo. I was exhausted—he’d paid me directly, cash, leaving my father out of it—and when I thanked him and asked if he knew of any more work, he said: Look, I’ve just opened a shop in New York, and if you want a job, you’ve got it. So we clinked glasses on it, and I went home, packed a suitcase full of books mostly, said goodbye to the housekeeper, and hitched a ride on the truck to New York the next day. Never looked back.”

A lull ensued. We were still sorting through the veneer: clicking fragments, paper-thin, like counters in some ancient game from China maybe, an eerie lightness in the sound which made you feel lost in some much larger silence.

“Hey,” I said, spotting a piece and snatching it up, passing it to him triumphantly: exact color match, closer than any of the pieces he’d set aside in his pile.

He took it from me, looked at it under the lamp. “It’s all right.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Well, you see—” he put the veneer up to the clock’s apron—“this kind of work, it’s the grain of the wood you really have to match. That’s the trick of it. Variations in tone are easier to fudge. Now this—” he held up a different piece, visibly several shades off—“with a little beeswax and a bit of the right coloring—maybe. Bichromate of potash, touch of Vandyke brown—sometimes, with a grain really difficult to match, certain kinds of walnut especially, I’ve used ammonia to darken a bit of new wood. But only when I was desperate. It’s always best to use wood of the same vintage as the piece you’re repairing, if you have it.”

“How’d you learn how to do all this?” I said, after a timid pause.

He laughed. “The same way you’re learning it now! Standing around and watching. Making myself useful.”

“Welty taught you?”

“Oh, no. He understood it—knew how it was done. You have to in this business. He had a very reliable eye and often I’d bob up and fetch him when I wanted a second opinion. But before I joined the enterprise usually he’d pass on a piece that needed restoration. It’s time-consuming work—takes a certain mind-set—he didn’t have the temperament nor the physical hardiness for it. He much preferred the acquisitions end—you know, going to auction—or being in the shop and chatting up the customers. Every afternoon around five, I’d pop up for a cup of tea. ‘Scourged from your dungeons.’ It really was pretty foul down here in the old days with the mold and damp. When I came to work for Welty—” he laughed—“he had this old fellow named Abner Mossbank. Bad legs, arthritis in his fingers, could barely see. It would take him a year sometimes to finish a piece. But I stood at his back and watched him work. He was like a surgeon. Couldn’t ask questions. Utter silence! But he knew absolutely everything—work that other people didn’t know how to do or care to learn any more—it hangs by a thread, this trade, generation to generation.”

“Your dad never gave you the money you earned?”

He laughed, warmly. “Not a penny! Never spoke to me again, either. He was a bitter old sod—fell down dead of a heart attack in the middle of firing one of his oldest employees. One of the most poorly attended funerals you’d ever care to see. Three black umbrellas in the sleet. Hard not to think of Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“You never went back to college?”

“No. Didn’t want to. I’d found what I liked to do. So—” he put both hands in the small of his back, and stretched; his out-at-elbows jacket, loose and a bit dirty, made him look like a good-natured groom on his way to the stables—“moral of the story is, who knows where it all will take you?”

“All what?”

He laughed. “Your sailing holiday,” he said, moving to the shelf where the jars of pigment were arrayed like potions in an apothecary; ocherous earths, poisonous greens, powders of charcoal and burnt bone. “Might be the decisive moment. It takes some people that way, the sea.”

“Andy gets seasick. He has to carry a baggie on the boat to throw up in.”

“Well—” reaching for a jar of lampblack—“must admit, it never took me that way. When I was a kid—‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ those Doré illustrations—no, the ocean gives me the shivers but then I’ve never been on an adventure like yours. You never know. Because—” brow furrowed, tapping out a bit of soft black powder on his palette—“I never dreamed that all that old furniture of Mrs. De Peyster’s would be the thing that decided my future. Maybe you’ll get fascinated by hermit crabs and study marine biology. Or decide you want to build boats, or be a marine painter, or write the definitive book about the Lusitania.”

“Maybe,” I said, hands behind my back. But what I really hoped I didn’t dare articulate. Even to think of it practically made me tremble. Because, the thing was: Kitsey and Toddy had started being much, much nicer to me, as if someone had drawn them aside; and I’d seen glances, subtle cues, between Mr. and Mrs. Barbour that made me hopeful—more than hopeful. In fact, it was Andy who’d put the thought in my head. “They think being around you is good for me,” he’d said on the way to school the other day. “That you’re drawing me out of my shell and making me more social. I’m thinking they might make a family announcement once we get up to Maine.”

“Announcement?”

“Don’t be a dunce. They’ve grown quite fond of you—Mother, especially. But Daddy, too. I believe they may want to keep you.”

xvii.

I RODE UPTOWN ON the bus, slightly drowsy, swaying comfortably back and forth and watching the wet Saturday streets flash by. When I stepped inside the apartment—chilled from walking home in the rain—Kitsey ran into the foyer to stare at me, wild-eyed and fascinated, as if I were an ostrich who had wandered into the apartment. Then, after a few blank seconds, she darted off into the living room, sandals clattering on the parquet floor, crying: “Mum? He’s here!”

Mrs. Barbour appeared. “Hello, Theo,” she said. She was perfectly composed but there was something constrained in her manner, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “Come in here. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

I followed her into Mr. Barbour’s study, gloomy in the overcast afternoon, where the framed nautical charts and the rain streaming down the gray windowpanes were like a theatrical set of a ship’s cabin on a storm-tossed sea. Across the room, a figure rose from a leather club chair. “Hi, buddy,” he said. “Long time no see.”

I stood frozen in the doorway. The voice was unmistakable: my father.

He stepped forward into the weak light from the window. It was him, all right, though he’d changed since I’d seen him: he was heavier, tanned, puffy in the face, with a new suit and a haircut that made him look like a downtown bartender. In my dismay, I glanced back to Mrs. Barbour, and she gave me a bright but helpless smile as if to say: I know, but what can I do?

While I still stood speechless with shock, another figure rose and elbowed forward, in front of my father. “Hi, I’m Xandra,” said a throaty voice.

I found myself confronted by a strange woman, tan and very fit-looking: flat gray eyes, lined coppery skin, and teeth that went in, with a split between them. Although she was older than my mother, or at any rate older-looking, she was dressed like someone younger: red platform sandals; low-slung jeans; wide belt; lots of gold jewelry. Her hair, the color of caramel straw, was very straight and tattered at the ends; she was chewing gum and a strong smell of Juicy Fruit was coming off her.

“It’s Xandra with an X,” she said in a gravelly undertone. Her eyes were clear and colorless, with spikes of dark mascara around them, and her gaze was powerful, confident, unwavering. “Not Sandra. And, God knows, not Sandy. I get that one a lot, and it drives me up the wall.”

As she spoke, my astonishment was growing by the moment. I couldn’t quite take her in: her whiskey voice, her muscular arms; the Chinese character tattooed on her big toe; her long square fingernails with the white tips painted on; her earrings shaped like starfish.

“Um, we just got into LaGuardia about two hours ago,” said my dad, clearing his throat, as if this explained everything.

Was this who my dad had left us for? In stupefaction, I looked back to Mrs. Barbour again—only to see that she had vanished.

“Theo, I’m out in Las Vegas now,” my father said, looking at the wall somewhere over my head. He still had the controlled, assertive voice of his actorly training but though he sounded as authoritative as ever, I could see that he wasn’t any more comfortable than I was. “I guess I should have called, but I thought it would be easier if we just came on out to get you.”

“Get me?” I said, after a long pause.

“Tell him, Larry,” said Xandra, and then, to me: “You should be proud of your Pops. He’s on the wagon. How many days’ sobriety now? Fifty-one? Did it all on his own too—didn’t even check himself into the joint—detoxed on the sofa with a basket of Easter candy and a bottle of Valium.”

Because I was too embarrassed to look at her, or my father, I looked back at the doorway again—and saw Kitsey Barbour standing in the hall listening to all this with big round eyes.

“Because, I mean, I just couldn’t put up with it,” said Xandra, in a tone suggesting that my mother had condoned, and encouraged, my dad’s alcoholism. “I mean—my Moms was the kind of lush who would throw up in her glass of Canadian Club and then drink it anyway. And one night I said to him: Larry, I’m not going to say to you ‘never drink again,’ and frankly I think that AA is way too much for the level of problem you have—”

My father cleared his throat and turned to me with a genial face he usually reserved for strangers. Maybe he had stopped drinking; but still he had a bloated, shiny, slightly stunned look, as if he’d been living for the past eight months off rum drinks and Hawaiian party platters.

“Um, son,” he said, “we’re right off the plane, and we came over because—we wanted to see you right away, of course…”

I waited.

“… we need the key to the apartment.”

This was all moving a little too fast for me. “The key?” I said.

“We can’t get in over there,” said Xandra bluntly. “We tried already.”

“The thing is, Theo,” my dad said, his tone clear and cordial, running a businesslike hand over his hair, “I need to get in over at Sutton Place and see what’s what. I’m sure things are a mess over there, and somebody needs to get in and start taking care of stuff.”

If you didn’t leave things such a goddamned mess… These were words I’d heard my father scream at my mother when—about two weeks before he vanished—they’d had the biggest fight I ever heard them have, when the diamond-and-emerald earrings that belonged to her mother vanished from the dish on her bedside table. My father (red in the face, mocking her in a sarcastic falsetto) had said it was her fault, Cinzia had probably taken them or who the hell knew, it wasn’t a good idea to leave jewelry lying out like that, and maybe this would teach her to look after her things better. But my mother—ash-white with anger—had pointed out in a cold still voice that she’d taken the earrings off on Friday night, and that Cinzia hadn’t been in to work since.

What the hell are you trying to say? bellowed my father.

Silence.

So I’m a thief now, is that it? You’re accusing your own husband of stealing jewelry from you? What the hell kind of sick irrational thing is that? You need help, you know that? You really need professional help—

Only it wasn’t just the earrings that had vanished. After he vanished himself, it turned out that some other things including cash and some antique coins belonging to her father had vanished as well; and my mother had changed the locks and warned Cinzia and the doormen not to let him in if he showed up when she was at work. And of course now everything was different, and there was nothing to stop him from going in the apartment and going through her belongings and doing with them what he liked; but as I stood looking at him and trying to think what the hell to say, half a dozen things were running through my mind and chief among them was the painting. Every day, for weeks, I’d told myself that I would go over and take care of it, figure it out somehow, but I’d kept putting it off and putting it off and now here he was.

My dad was still smiling at me fixedly. “Okay, buddy? Think you might want to help us out?” Maybe he wasn’t drinking any more, but all the old late afternoon wanting-a-drink edge was still there, scratchy as sandpaper.

“I don’t have the key,” I said.

“That’s okay,” my dad returned swiftly. “We can call a locksmith. Xandra, give me the phone.”

I thought fast. I didn’t want them to go in the apartment without me. “Jose or Goldie might let us in,” I said. “If I go over there with you.”

“Fine then,” said my dad, “let’s go.” From his tone, I suspected he knew I was lying about the key (safely hidden, in Andy’s room). I knew too he didn’t like the sound of involving the doormen, as most of the guys who worked in the building didn’t care that much for my father, having seen him the worse for drink a few too many times. But I met his eye as blankly as I could until he shrugged and turned away.

xviii.

“¡HOLA, JOSE!”

“¡Bomba!” cried Jose, doing a happy step backward when he saw me on the sidewalk; he was the youngest and most buoyant of the doormen, always trying to sneak away before his shift was over to play soccer in the park. “Theo! ¿Qué lo que, manito?”

His uncomplicated smile threw me back hard to the past. Everything was the same: green awning, sallow shade, same furry brown puddle collecting in the sunken place in the sidewalk. Standing before the art-deco doors—nickel-bright, rayed with abstract sunbursts, doors that urgent news guys in fedoras might push through in a 1930s movie—I remembered all the times I’d stepped inside to find my mother sorting the mail, waiting for the elevator. Fresh from work, heels and briefcase, with the flowers I’d sent for her birthday. Well what do you know. My secret admirer has struck again.

Jose, looking past me, had spotted my father, and Xandra, hanging back slightly. “Hello, Mr. Decker,” he said, in a more formal tone, reaching around me to take my dad’s hand: politely, but no love lost. “Is nice to see you.”

My father, with his Personable Smile, started to answer but I was too nervous and interrupted: “Jose—” I’d been racking my brains for the Spanish on the way over, rehearsing the sentence in my mind—“ mi papá quiere entrar en el apartamento, le necesitamos abrir la puerta.” Then, quickly, I slipped in the question I’d worked out earlier, on the way over: “¿Usted puede subir con nosotros?”

Jose’s eyes went quickly to my father and Xandra. He was a big, handsome guy from the Dominican Republic, something about him reminiscent of the young Muhammad Ali—sweet-tempered, always kidding around, but you didn’t want to mess with him. Once, in a moment of confidence, he had pulled up his uniform jacket and shown me a knife scar on his abdomen, which he said he’d gotten in a street fight in Miami.

“Happy to do it,” he said in English, in an easy voice. He was looking at them but I knew he was talking to me. “I’ll take you up. Everything is okay?”

“Yep, we’re fine,” said my dad curtly. He was the very one who’d insisted that I study Spanish as my foreign language instead of German (“so at least one person in the family can communicate with these fucking doormen”).

Xandra, who I was starting to think was a real dingbat, laughed nervously and said in her stuttery quick voice: “Yeah, we’re fine, but the flight really took it out of us. It’s a long way from Vegas and we’re still a little—” and here she rolled her eyes and waggled her fingers to indicate wooziness.

“Oh yeah?” said Jose. “Today? You flew into LaGuardia?” Like all the doormen he was a genius at small talk, especially if it was about traffic or weather, the best route to the airport at rush hour. “I heard big delays out there today, some problem with the baggage handlers, the union, right?”

All the way up in the elevator, Xandra kept up a steady but agitated stream of chatter: about how dirty New York was compared to Las Vegas (“Yeah, I admit it, everything’s cleaner out west, I guess I’m spoiled”), about her bad turkey sandwich on the airplane and the flight attendant who “forgot” (Xandra, with her fingertips, inserting the quotations manually) to bring Xandra the five dollars change from the wine she ordered.

“Oh, ma’am!” said Jose, stepping in the hallway, wagging his head in the mock-serious way he had. “Airplane food, it’s the worst. These days you’re lucky if they feed you at all. Tell you one thing in New York, though. You going to find you some good food. You got good Vietnamese, good Cuban, good Indian—”

“I don’t like all that spicy stuff.”

“Good whatever you want, then. We got it. Segundito,” he said, holding up a finger as he felt around on the ring for the passkey.

The lock tumbled with a solid clunk, instinctive, blood-deep in its rightness. Though the place was stuffy from being shut up, still I was leveled by the fierce smell of home: books and old rugs and lemon floor cleaner, the dark myrrh-smelling candles she bought at Barney’s.

The bag from the museum was propped on the floor by the sofa—exactly where I’d left it, how many weeks before? Feeling light-headed, I darted around and inside to grab it as Jose—slightly blocking my irritated father’s path, without quite appearing to—stood just outside the door listening to Xandra, arms folded. The composed but slightly absent-minded look on his face reminded me of the way he’d looked when he’d had to practically carry my dad upstairs one freezing night, my dad so drunk he’d lost his overcoat.—Happens in the best of families, he’d said with an abstract smile, refusing the twenty-dollar bill that my father—incoherent, vomit on his suit jacket, scratched-up and dirty like he’d been rolling on the sidewalk—was trying hard to push into his face.

“Actually, I’m from the East Coast?” Xandra was saying. “From Florida?” Again that nervous laugh—stuttery, sputtering. “West Palm, to be specific.”

“Florida you say?” I heard Jose remark. “Is beautiful down there.”

“Yeah, it’s great. At least in Vegas we’ve got the sunshine—I don’t know if I could take the winters out here, I’d turn into a Popsicle—”

The instant I picked the bag up, I realized it was too light—almost empty. Where the hell was the painting? Though I was nearly blind with panic, I didn’t stop but kept going, down the hallway, on autopilot, back to my bedroom, mind whirring and grinding as I walked—

Suddenly—through my disconnected memories of that night—it came back to me. The bag had been wet. I hadn’t wanted to leave the picture in a wet bag, to mildew or melt or who knew what. Instead—how could I have forgotten?—I’d set it on my mother’s bureau, the first thing she’d see when she came home. Quickly, without stopping, I dropped the bag in the hallway outside the closed door of my bedroom and turned into my mother’s room, light-headed with fear, hoping that my father wasn’t following but too afraid to look back and see.

From the living room, I heard Xandra say: “I bet you see a lot of celebrities on the street here, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. LeBron, Dan Aykroyd, Tara Reid, Jay-Z, Madonna…”

My mother’s bedroom was dark and cool, and the faint, just-detectable smell of her perfume was almost more than I could bear. There sat the painting, propped among silver-framed photographs—her parents, her, me at many ages, horses and dogs galore: her father’s mare Chalkboard, Bruno the Great Dane, her dachshund Poppy who’d died when I was in kindergarten. Steeling myself against her reading glasses on the bureau and her black tights stiff where she’d draped them to dry and her handwriting on her desk calendar and a million other heart-piercing sights, I picked it up and tucked it under my arm and walked quickly into my own room across the hall.

My room—like the kitchen—faced the airshaft, and was dark without the lights on. A dank bath towel lay crumpled where I’d thrown it after my shower that last morning, atop a heap of dirty clothes. I picked it up—wincing at the smell—with the idea of throwing it over the painting while I found a better place to hide it, maybe in the—

“What are you doing?”

My father stood in the doorway, a darkish silhouette with the light shining behind him.

“Nothing.”

He stooped and picked up the bag I’d dropped in the hall. “What’s this out here?”

“My book bag,” I said, after a pause—though the thing was clearly a mom’s collapsible shopping tote, nothing I, or any kid, would ever take to school.

He tossed it in the open door, crinkling his nose at the smell. “Phew,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face, “it smells like old hockey socks in here.” As he reached inside the door and flipped the light switch, I managed with a complex but spasmodic movement to throw the towel over the picture so (I hoped) he couldn’t see it.

“What’s that you’ve got there?”

“A poster.”

“Well look, I hope you’re not planning to haul a lot of junk out to Vegas. No need to pack your winter clothes—you won’t need them, except maybe some ski stuff. You won’t believe the skiing in Tahoe—not like these icy little mountains upstate.”

I felt that I needed to make a reply, especially since it was the longest and friendliest-seeming thing he’d said since he’d shown up, but somehow I couldn’t quite pull my thoughts together.

Abruptly, my father said: “Your mother wasn’t so easy to live with either, you know.” He picked up something that looked like an old math test from my desk, examined it, and then threw it back down. “She played her cards way too close to the vest. You know how she used to do. Clamming up. Freezing me out. Always had to take the high road. It was a power thing, you know—really controlling. Quite honestly, and I really hate to say this, it got to the point where it was hard for me to even be in the same room with her. I mean, I’m not saying she was a bad person. It’s just one minute everything’s fine, and the next, bam, what did I do, the old silent treatment…”

I said nothing—standing there awkwardly with the mildewy towel draped over the painting and the light shining into my eyes, wishing that I were anywhere else (Tibet, Lake Tahoe, the moon) and not trusting myself to reply. What he’d said about my mother was perfectly true: often she was uncommunicative, and when she was upset it was difficult to tell what she was thinking, but I wasn’t interested in a discussion of my mother’s faults and at any rate they seemed like fairly minor faults compared to my father’s.

My father was saying: “… because I’ve got nothing to prove, see? Every game has two sides. It’s not an issue of who’s right and who’s wrong. And sure, I’ll admit, I’m to blame for some of it too, although I’ll say this, and I’m sure you know it too, she sure did have a way of re-writing history in her own favor.” It was strange to be in the room with him again, especially as he was so different: he gave off a different smell almost, and there was a different heaviness and weight to him, a sleekness, as though he were padded all over with a smooth half-inch of fat. “I guess a lot of marriages run into problems like ours—she’d just gotten so bitter, you know? And withholding? Honestly, I just didn’t feel like I could live with her any longer, though God knows she didn’t deserve this.…”

She sure didn’t, I thought.

“Because you know what this was really about, don’t you?” said my dad, leaning on the door frame with one elbow and looking at me shrewdly. “Me leaving? I had to withdraw some money from our bank account to pay taxes and she flipped her lid, like I’d stolen it.” He was watching me very carefully, looking for my response. “Our joint bank account. I mean basically, when the chips were down, she didn’t trust me. Her own husband.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was the first I’d heard about the taxes, although it was certainly no secret that my mother didn’t trust my dad where money was concerned.

“God, but she could hold on to a grievance,” he said, with a half-humorous wince, wiping his hand down the front of his face. “Tit for tat. Always looking to even the score. Because, I mean it—she never forgot anything. If she had to wait twenty years, she was going to get you back. And sure, I’m the one who always looks like the bad guy and maybe I am the bad guy…”

The painting, though small, was getting heavy, and my face felt frozen with the effort of concealing my discomfort. In order to block his voice out I started counting to myself in Spanish. Uno dos tres, cuatro cinco seis…

By the time I reached twenty-nine, Xandra had appeared.

“Larry,” she said, “you and your wife had a really nice place here.” The way she said it made me feel bad for her without liking her any better.

My dad put his arm around her waist and drew her to him with a sort of kneading motion that made me sick. “Well,” he said modestly, “it’s really more hers than mine.”

You can say that again, I thought.

“Come in here,” said my dad, catching her by the hand and leading her away towards my mother’s bedroom, all thought of me forgotten. “I want you to see something.” I turned and watched them go, queasy at the prospect of Xandra and my father pawing through my mother’s things but so glad to see them go I didn’t care.

With one eye on the empty doorway, I walked around to the far side of my bed and placed the painting out of sight. An old New York Post lay on the floor—the same newspaper that she’d thrown in to me, in a flap, on our last Saturday together. Here, kiddo, she’d said, sticking her head in at the door, pick a movie. Though there were several movies we both would have liked, I’d chosen a matinee at the Boris Karloff film festival: The Body Snatcher. She had accepted my choice without a word of complaint; we’d gone down to Film Forum, watched the movie, and after it was over walked to Moondance Diner for a hamburger—a perfectly pleasant Saturday afternoon, apart from the fact that it was her last on Earth, and now I felt rotten whenever I thought about it, since (thanks to me) the last movie she’d ever seen was a corny old horror flick about corpses and grave-robbing. (If I’d picked the movie I knew she wanted to see—the well-reviewed one about Parisian children during World War I—might she have lived, somehow? My thoughts often ran along such dark, superstitious faultlines.)

Though the newspaper felt sacrosanct, an historical document, I turned it to the middle and took it apart. Grimly, I wrapped the painting, sheet by sheet, and taped it up with the same tape I’d used a few months before to wrap my mother’s Christmas present. Perfect! she’d said, in a storm of colored paper, leaning in her bathrobe to kiss me: a watercolor set she would never be carrying to the park, on Saturday mornings in summer she would never see.

My bed—a brass camp bed from the flea market, soldierly and reassuring—had always seemed like the safest place in the world to hide something. But now, looking around (beat-up desk, Japanese Godzilla poster, the penguin mug from the zoo that I used as a pencil cup), I felt the impermanence of it all strike me hard; and it made me dizzy to think of all our things flying out of the apartment, furniture and silver and all my mother’s clothes: sample-sale dresses with the tags still on them, all those colored ballet slippers and tailored shirts with her initials on the cuffs. Chairs and Chinese lamps, old jazz records on vinyl that she’d bought down in the Village, jars of marmalade and olives and sharp German mustard in the refrigerator. In the bathroom, a bewilderment of perfumed oils and moisturizers, colored bubble bath, half-empty bottles of overpriced shampoo crowded on the side of the tub (Kiehl’s, Klorane, Kérastase, my mother always had five or six kinds going). How could the apartment have seemed so permanent and solid-looking when it was only a stage set, waiting to be struck and carried away by movers in uniform?

When I walked into the living room, I was confronted by a sweater of my mother’s lying across the chair where she’d left it, a sky-blue ghost of her. Shells we’d picked up on the beach at Wellfleet. Hyacinths, which she’d bought at the Korean market a few days before she died, with the stems draped dead-black and rotten over the side of the pot. In the wastebasket: catalogues from Dover Books, Belgian Shoes; a wrapper from a pack of Necco Wafers, which had been her favorite candy. I picked it up and sniffed it. The sweater—I knew—would smell of her too if I picked it up and put it to my face, yet even the sight of it was unendurable.

I went back in my bedroom and stood on my desk chair and got down my suitcase—which was soft-sided and not too big—and packed it full of clean underwear, clean school clothes, and folded shirts from the laundry. Then I put in the painting, with another layer of clothes on top.

I zipped the suitcase—no lock, but it was only canvas—and stood very still. Then I went out into the hall. I could hear drawers opening and shutting in my mother’s bedroom. A giggle.

“Dad,” I said in a loud voice, “I’m going downstairs and talk to Jose.”

Their voices went dead silent.

“You bet,” said my father, through the closed door, in an unnaturally cordial tone.

I went back and got the suitcase and walked out of the apartment with it, leaving the front door cracked so I could get in again. Then I rode the elevator down, staring into the mirror that faced me, trying hard not to think about Xandra in my mother’s bedroom pawing through her clothes. Had he been seeing her before he left home? Didn’t he feel even a bit creepy about permitting her to root around in my mother’s things?

I was walking to the front door where Jose was on duty when a voice called: “Wait a sec!”

Turning, I saw Goldie, hurrying from the package room.

“Theo, my God, I’m sorry,” he said. We stood looking at each other for an uncertain moment and then—in an impulsive, what-the-hell movement, so awkward it was almost funny, he reached around and hugged me.

“So sorry,” he repeated, shaking his head. “My God, what a thing.” Goldie, since his divorce, often worked nights and holidays, standing at the doors with his gloves off and an unlit cigarette in his hand, looking out at the street. My mother had sometimes sent me down with coffee and doughnuts for him when he was in the lobby by himself, no company but the lighted tree and the electric menorah, sorting out the newspapers by himself at 5:00 a.m. on Christmas Day, and the expression on his face reminded me of those dead holiday mornings, empty-looking stare, his face ashy and uncertain, in the unguarded moment before he saw me and put on his best hi kid smile.

“I been thinking about you and your mother so much,” he said, wiping his brow. “Ay bendito. I can’t—I don’t even know what you must be going through.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking away, “it’s been hard”—which was for whatever reason the phrase I constantly fell back upon when people told me how sorry they were. I’d had to say it so much that it was starting to come out sounding glib and a bit phony.

“I’m glad you stopped by,” said Goldie. “That morning—I was on duty, you remember? Right out front there?”

“Sure I do,” I said, wondering at his urgency, as if he thought I might not remember.

“Oh, my God.” He passed his hand over his forehead, a little wild-looking, as if he himself had suffered only a narrow escape. “I think about it every single day. I still see her face, you know, getting into that cab? Waving goodbye, so happy.”

Confidentially, he leaned forward. “When I heard she died?” he said, as if telling me a big secret. “I called up my ex-wife, that’s how upset I was.” He pulled back and looked at me with raised eyebrows, as if he didn’t expect me to believe him. Goldie’s battles with his ex-wife were epic.

“I mean, we hardly talk,” he said, “but who I’m gonna tell? I gotta tell somebody, you know? So I called her up and told her: ‘Rosa, you can’t believe it. We lost such a beautiful lady from the building.’ ”

Jose—spotting me—had strolled back from the front door to join our conversation, in his distinctive springy walk. “Mrs. Decker,” he said—shaking his head fondly, as if there had never been anyone like her. “Always say hello, always such a nice smile. Considerate, you know.”

“Not like some of these people in the building,” said Goldie, glancing over his shoulder. “You know—” he leaned closer, and mouthed the word—“snobby. The kind of person stands there empty-handed with no packages or nothing and waits for you to open the door, is what I’m saying.”

“She wasn’t like that,” said Jose, still shaking his head—big head movements, like a somber child saying no. “Mrs. Decker was Class A.”

“Say, will you wait here a second?” Goldie said, holding up his hand. “I’ll be right back. Don’t leave. Don’t let him leave,” he said to Jose.

“You want me to get you a cab, manito?” said Jose, eyeing the suitcase.

“No,” I said, glancing back at the elevator. “Listen, Jose, will you keep this for me until I come back and get it?”

“Sure,” he said, picking it up and hefting it. “Happy to.”

“I’ll come back for it myself, okay? Don’t let anybody else have it.”

“Sure, I get it,” said Jose pleasantly. I followed him into the package room, where he tagged the bag and hoisted it onto a top shelf.

“You see?” he said. “Out of the way, baby. We don’t keep nothing up high there except some packages people got to sign for and our own personal stuff. Nobody’s going to release that bag to you without your personal signature, you understand? Not to your uncle, your cousin, nobody. And I’ll tell Carlos and Goldie and the other guys, don’t give that bag to nobody but you. Okay?”

I was nodding, about to thank him, when Jose cleared his throat. “Listen,” he said, in a lowered voice. “I don’t want to worry you or nothing but there’ve been some guys coming around lately asking after your dad.”

“Guys?” I said, after a disjointed silence. “Guys,” coming from Jose, meant only one thing: men that my dad owed money to.

“Don’t worry. We told them nothing. I mean, your dad’s been gone for what, like a year? Carlos told them none of you lived here no more and they aint been back. But—” he glanced at the elevator—“maybe your dad there, he don’t want to be spending a lot of time in the building just now, you know what I’m saying?”

I was thanking him when Goldie returned with what looked to me like a gigantic wad of cash. “This is for you,” he said, a bit melodramatically.

For a minute I thought I’d heard him wrong. Jose coughed and looked away. On the package room’s tiny black and white television (its screen no bigger than a CD case) a glamorous woman in long jangling earrings brandished her fists and shouted abusive Spanish at a cowering priest.

“What’s going on?” I said to Goldie, who was still holding the money out.

“Your mother, she didn’t tell you?”

I was mystified. “Tell me what?”

It seemed that—one day shortly before Christmas—Goldie had ordered a computer and had it delivered to the building. The computer was for Goldie’s son, who needed it for school, but (Goldie was hazy about this part) Goldie hadn’t actually paid for it, or had only paid for part of it, or his ex-wife had been supposed to pay for it instead of him. At any rate, the delivery people were hauling the computer out the door again and loading it back into their van when my mother happened to come downstairs and see what was going on.

“And she paid herself, that beautiful lady,” Goldie said. “She saw what was happening, and she opened her bag and she took out her checkbook. She said to me, ‘Goldie, I know your son needs this computer for his schoolwork. Please let me do this thing for you, my friend, and you pay me when you can.’ ”

“You see?” said Jose, unexpectedly fierce, glancing back from the television, where the woman was standing in a graveyard now, arguing with a tycoon-looking guy in sunglasses. “That’s your mother that did that.” He nodded at the money, almost angrily. “Sí, es verdad, she was Class A. She cared about people you know? Most women? They spend that money on gold earrings or perfume or some things for themselves like that.”

I felt strange taking the money, for all sorts of reasons. Even in my shock, something about the story felt dodgy (what kind of store would deliver a computer that wasn’t paid for?). Later, I wondered: did I look that destitute, that the doormen had taken up a collection for me? I still don’t know where the money came from; and I wish I had asked more questions, but I was so stunned by everything that had happened that day (and more than anything by the sudden appearance of my dad, and Xandra) that if Goldie had confronted me and tried to give me a piece of old chewing gum he’d scraped off the floor I would have held out my hand and taken it just as obediently.

“None of my business, you know,” Jose said, looking over my head as he said it, “but if I was you, I wouldn’t tell anybody about that money. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, put it in your pocket,” said Goldie. “Don’t walk around waving it out in your hand like that. Plenty of people on the street would kill you for that much cash.”

“Plenty of people in this building!” said Jose, overcome with sudden laughter.

“Ha!” said Goldie, cracking up himself, and then said something in Spanish I didn’t understand.

“Cuidado,” said Jose—wagging his head in the way he did, mock-serious, but unable to keep from smiling. “That’s why they don’t let Goldie and me work on the same floor,” he said to me. “They got to keep us separated. We have too good a time.”

xix.

ONCE DAD AND XANDRA showed up, things started moving fast. At dinner that night (at a touristy restaurant I was surprised my dad had chosen), he took a call at the table from somebody at my mother’s insurance company—which, even all these years later, I wish I’d been able to hear better. But the restaurant was loud and Xandra (between gulps of white wine—maybe he’d quit drinking, but she sure hadn’t) was alternately complaining because she couldn’t smoke and telling me in a sort of unfocused way how she’d learned to practice witchcraft out of a library book when she was in high school, somewhere in Fort Lauderdale. (“Actually, Wicca it’s called. It’s an earth religion.”) With anyone else, I would have asked exactly what it involved, being a witch (spells and sacrifices? deal with the devil?) but before I had a chance she’d moved on, how she’d had the opportunity to go to college and was sorry she hadn’t done it (“I’ll tell you what I was interested in. English history and like that. Henry the Eighth, Mary Queen of Scots”). But she’d ended up not going to college at all because she’d been too obsessed with this guy. “Obsessed,” she hissed, fixing me with her sharp, no-color eyes.

Why being obsessed with the guy kept Xandra from going to college, I never found out, because my dad got off the phone. He ordered (and it gave me a funny feeling) a bottle of champagne.

“I can’t drink this whole damn thing,” said Xandra, who was into her second glass of wine. “It’ll give me a headache.”

“Well, if I can’t have champagne, you might as well have some,” my father said, leaning back in his chair.

Xandra nodded at me. “Let him have some,” she said. “Waiter, bring another glass.”

“Sorry,” said the waiter, a hard-edged Italian guy who looked like he was used to dealing with out-of-control tourists. “No alcohol if he’s under eighteen.”

Xandra started scrabbling in her purse. She was wearing a brown halter dress, and she had blusher, or bronzer, or some brownish powder brushed under her cheekbones in such a strong line that I had an urge to smudge it in with my fingertip.

“Let’s go outside and have a smoke,” she said to my father. There was a long moment where they exchanged a smirky look that made me cringe. Then Xandra pushed her chair back and—dropping her napkin in the chair—looked around for the waiter. “Oh, good, he’s gone,” she said, reaching for my (mostly) empty water glass and slopping some champagne into it.

The food had arrived and I’d poured myself another large but surreptitious glass of champagne before they returned. “Yum!” said Xandra, looking glazed and a bit shiny, tugging her short skirt down, edging around and slithering back into her seat without bothering to pull her chair out all the way. She flapped her napkin into her lap and pulled her massive, bright-red plate of manicotti towards her. “Looks awesome!”

“So does mine,” said my dad, who was picky about his Italian food, and whom I’d often known to complain about overly tomatoey, marinara-drenched pasta dishes exactly like the plate in front of him.

As they tucked into their food (which was probably fairly cold, judging by how long they’d been gone), they resumed their conversation in mid-stream. “Well, anyway, didn’t work out,” he said, leaning back in his chair and toying rakishly with a cigarette he was unable to light. “That’s how it goes.”

“I bet you were great.”

He shrugged. “Even when you’re young,” he said, “it’s a tough game. It’s not just talent. It has a lot to do with looks and luck.”

“But still,” said Xandra, blotting the corner of her lip with a napkin-wrapped fingertip. “An actor. I can so totally see it.” My dad’s thwarted acting career was one of his favorite subjects and—though she seemed interested enough—something told me that this wasn’t the very first time she had heard about it either.

“Well, do I wish I’d kept going with it?” My dad contemplated his non-alcoholic beer (or was it three percent? I couldn’t see from where I was sitting). “I have to say yes. It’s one of those lifelong regrets. I would have loved to do something with my gift but I didn’t have the luxury. Life has a funny way of intervening.”

They were deep in their own world; for all the attention they were paying to me I might as well have been in Idaho but that was fine with me; I knew this story. My dad, who’d been a drama star in college, had for a brief while earned his living as an actor: voice-overs in commercials, a few minor parts (a murdered playboy, the spoiled son of a mob boss) in television and movies. Then—after he’d married my mother—it had all fizzled out. He had a long list of reasons why he hadn’t broken through, though as I’d often heard him say: if my mother had been a little more successful as a model or worked a little harder at it, there would have been enough money for him to concentrate on acting without worrying about a day job.

My dad pushed his plate aside. I noticed that he hadn’t eaten very much—often, with my dad, a sign that he was drinking, or about to start.

“At some point, I just had to cut my losses and get out,” he said, crumpling his napkin and throwing it on the table. I wondered if he had told Xandra about Mickey Rourke, whom he viewed apart from me and my mother as the prime villain in derailing his career.

Xandra took a big drink of her wine. “Do you ever think about going back to it?”

“I think about it, sure. But—” he shook his head as if refusing some outrageous request—“no. Essentially the answer is no.”

The champagne tickled the roof of my mouth—distant, dusty sparkle, bottled in a happier year when my mother was still alive.

“I mean, the second he saw me, I knew he didn’t like me,” my dad was saying to her quietly. So he had told her about Mickey Rourke.

She tossed her head, drained the rest of her wine. “Guys like that can’t stand competition.”

“It was all Mickey this, Mickey that, Mickey wants to meet you, but the minute I walked in there I knew it was over.”

“Obviously the guy’s a freak.”

“Not then, he wasn’t. Because, tell you the truth, there really was a resemblance back in the day—not just physically, but we had similar acting styles. Or, let’s say, I was classically trained, I had a range, but I could do the same kind of stillness as Mickey, you know, that whispery quiet thing—”

“Oooh, you just gave me chills. Whispery. Like the way you said that.”

“Yeah, but Mickey was the star. There wasn’t room enough for two.”

As I watched them sharing a piece of cheesecake like lovebirds in a commercial, I sank into a ruddy, unfamiliar free-flow of mind, the dining room lights too bright and my face flaming hot from the champagne, thinking in a disordered but heated way about my mother after her parents died and she had to go live with her aunt Bess, in a house by the train tracks with brown wallpaper and plastic covers on the furniture. Aunt Bess—who fried everything in Crisco, and had cut up one of my mother’s dresses with scissors because the psychedelic pattern disturbed her—was a chunky, embittered, Irish-American spinster who had left the Catholic Church for some tiny, insane sect that believed it was wrong to do things like drink tea or take aspirin. Her eyes—in the one photograph I’d seen—were the same startling silver-blue as my mother’s, only pink-rimmed and crazed, in a potato-plain face. My mother had spoken of those eighteen months with Aunt Bess as the saddest of her life—the horses sold, the dogs given away, long weeping goodbyes by the side of the road, arms around the necks of Clover and Chalkboard and Paintbox and Bruno. Back in the house, Aunt Bess had told my mother she was spoiled, and that people who didn’t fear the Lord always got what they deserved.

“And the producer, you see—I mean, they all knew how Mickey was, everyone did, he was already starting to get a reputation for being difficult—”

“She didn’t deserve it,” I said aloud, interrupting their conversation.

Dad and Xandra stopped talking and looked at me as if I’d turned into a Gila monster.

“I mean, why would anybody say that?” It wasn’t right that I was speaking aloud, and yet the words were tumbling unbidden out of my mouth as if someone had pushed a button. “She was so great and why was everybody so horrible to her? She never deserved any of the stuff that happened to her.”

My dad and Xandra exchanged a glance. Then he signalled for the check.

xx.

BY THE TIME WE left the restaurant, my face was on fire and there was a bright roar in my ears, and when I got back to the Barbours’ apartment, it wasn’t even terribly late but somehow I tripped over the umbrella stand and made a lot of noise coming in and when Mrs. Barbour and Mr. Barbour saw me, I realized (from their faces, more than the way I felt) that I was drunk.

Mr. Barbour flicked off the television with the remote control. “Where have you been?” he said, in a firm but good-natured voice.

I reached for the back of the sofa. “Out with Dad and—” But her name had slipped my mind, everything but the X.

Mrs. Barbour raised her eyebrows at her husband as if to say: what did I tell you?

“Well, take it on in to bed, pal,” said Mr. Barbour cheerfully, in a voice that managed, in spite of everything, to make me feel a little bit better about life in general. “But try not to wake Andy up.”

“You don’t feel sick, do you?” Mrs. Barbour said.

“No,” I said, though I did; and for a large part of the night I lay awake in the upper bunk, miserable and tossing as the room spun around me, and a couple of times starting up in heart-thudding surprise because it seemed that Xandra had walked in the room and was talking to me: the words indistinct, but the rough, stuttery cadence of her voice unmistakable.

xxi.

“SO,” SAID MR. BARBOUR at breakfast the next morning, clapping a hand on my shoulder as he pulled out the chair beside me, “festive dinner with old Dad, eh?”

“Yes, sir.” I had a splitting headache, and the smell of their French toast made my stomach twist. Etta had unobtrusively brought me a cup of coffee from the kitchen with a couple of aspirins on the saucer.

“Out in Las Vegas, do you say?”

“That’s right.”

“And how does he bring in the bacon?”

“Sorry?”

“How does he keep himself busy out there?”

“Chance,” said Mrs. Barbour, in a neutral voice.

“Well, I mean… that is to say,” Mr. Barbour said, realizing that the question had perhaps been indelicately phrased, “what line of work is he in?”

“Um—” I said—and then stopped. What was my dad doing? I hadn’t a clue.

Mrs. Barbour—who seemed troubled by the turn the conversation had taken—appeared about to say something; but Platt—next to me—spoke up angrily instead. “So who do I have to blow to get a cup of coffee around this place?” he said to his mother, pushing back in his chair with one hand on the table.

There was a dreadful silence.

“He has it,” said Platt, nodding at me. “He comes home drunk, and he gets coffee?”

After another dreadful silence, Mr. Barbour said—in a voice icy enough to put even Mrs. Barbour to shame—“That’s quite enough, Pard.”

Mrs. Barbour brought her pale eyebrows together. “Chance—”

“No, you won’t take up for him this time. Go to your room,” he said to Platt. “Now.”

We all sat staring into our plates, listening to the angry thump of Platt’s footsteps, the deafening slam of his door, and then—a few seconds later—the loud music starting up again. No one said much for the rest of the meal.

xxii.

MY DAD—WHO LIKED TO do everything in a hurry, always itching to “get the show on the road” as he liked to say—announced that he planned to get everything wrapped up in New York and the three of us in Las Vegas within a week. And he was true to his word. At eight o’clock that Monday morning, movers showed up at Sutton Place and began to dismantle the apartment and pack it in boxes. A used-book dealer came to look at my mother’s art books, and somebody else came in to look at her furniture—and, almost before I knew it, my home began to vanish before my eyes with sickening speed. Watching the curtains disappear and the pictures taken down and the carpets rolled up and carried away, I was reminded of an animated film I’d once seen where a cartoon character with an eraser rubbed out his desk and his lamp and his chair and his window with a scenic view and the whole of his comfortably appointed office until—at last—the eraser hung suspended in a disturbing sea of white.

Tormented by what was happening, yet unable to stop it, I hovered around and watched the apartment vanishing piece by piece, like a bee watching its hive being destroyed. On the wall over my mother’s desk (among numerous vacation snaps and old school pictures) hung a black and white photo from her modelling days taken in Central Park. It was a very sharp print, and the tiniest details stood out with almost painful clarity: her freckles, the rough texture of her coat, the chickenpox scar above her left eyebrow. Cheerfully, she looked out into the disarray and confusion of the living room, at my dad throwing out her papers and art supplies and boxing up her books for Goodwill, a scene she probably never dreamed of, or at least I hope she didn’t.

xxiii.

MY LAST DAYS WITH the Barbours flew by so fast that I scarcely remember them, apart from a last-minute flurry of laundry and dry cleaning, and several hectic trips to the wine shop on Lex for cardboard boxes. In black marker, I wrote the address of my exotic-sounding new home:

Theodore Decker c/o Xandra Terrell

6219 Desert End Road

Las Vegas, NV

Glumly, Andy and I stood and contemplated the labeled boxes in his bedroom. “It’s like you’re moving to a different planet,” he said.

“More or less.”

“No I’m serious. That address. It’s like from some mining colony on Jupiter. I wonder what your school will be like.”

“God knows.”

“I mean—it might be one of those places you read about. With gangs. Metal detectors.” Andy had been so mistreated at our (supposedly) enlightened and progressive school that public school, in his view, was on a par with the prison system. “What will you do?”

“Shave my head, I guess. Get a tattoo.” I liked that he didn’t try to be upbeat or cheerful about the move, unlike Mrs. Swanson or Dave (who was clearly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to negotiate any more with my grandparents). Nobody else at Park Avenue said much about my departure, though I knew from the strained expression Mrs. Barbour got when the subject of my father and his “friend” came up that I wasn’t totally imagining things. And besides, it wasn’t that the future with Dad and Xandra seemed bad or frightening so much as incomprehensible, a blot of black ink on the horizon.

xxiv.

“WELL, A CHANGE OF scenery may be good for you,” said Hobie when I went down to see him before I left. “Even if the scene isn’t what you’d choose.” We were having dinner in the dining room for a change, sitting together at the far end of the table, long enough to seat twelve, silver ewers and ornaments stretching off into opulent darkness. Yet somehow it still felt like the last night in our old apartment on Seventh Avenue, my mother and father and I sitting atop cardboard boxes to eat our Chinese take-out dinner.

I said nothing. I was miserable; and my determination to suffer in secret had made me uncommunicative. All during the anxiety of the previous week, as the apartment was being stripped and my mother’s things were folded and boxed and carted off to be sold, I’d yearned for the darkness and repose of Hobie’s house, its crowded rooms and old-wood smell, tea leaves and tobacco smoke, bowls of oranges on the sideboard and candlesticks scalloped with puddled beeswax.

“I mean, your mother—” He paused delicately. “It’ll be a fresh start.”

I studied my plate. He’d made lamb curry, with a lemon-colored sauce that tasted more French than Indian.

“You’re not afraid, are you?”

I glanced up. “Afraid of what?”

“Of going to live with him.”

I thought about it, gazing off into the shadows behind his head. “No,” I said, “not really.” For whatever reason, since his return my dad seemed looser, more relaxed. I couldn’t attribute it to the fact that he’d stopped drinking, since normally when my dad was on the wagon he grew silent and visibly swollen with misery, so prone to snap that I took good care to stay an arm’s reach away.

“Have you told anyone else what you told me?”

“About—?”

In embarrassment, I put my head down and took a bite of the curry. It was actually pretty good once you got used to the fact it wasn’t curry.

“I don’t think he’s drinking any more,” I said, in the silence that followed. “If that’s what you mean? He seems better. So…” Awkwardly, I trailed away. “Yeah.”

“How do you like his girlfriend?”

I had to think about that one too. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

Hobie was amiably silent, reaching for his wine glass without taking his eyes off me.

“Like, I don’t really know her? She’s okay, I guess. I can’t understand what he likes about her.”

“Why not?”

“Well—” I didn’t know where to begin. My dad could be charming to ‘the ladies’ as he called them, opening doors for them, lightly touching their wrists to make a point; I’d seen women fall apart over him, a spectacle I watched coldly, wondering how anyone could be taken in by such a transparent act. It was like watching small children being fooled by a cheesy magic show. “I don’t know. I guess I thought she’d be better looking or something.”

“Pretty doesn’t matter if she’s nice,” said Hobie.

“Yeah, but she’s not all that nice.”

“Oh.” Then: “Do they seem happy together?”

“I don’t know. Well—yes,” I admitted. “Like, he doesn’t seem constantly so mad all the time?” Then, feeling the weight of Hobie’s un-asked question pressing in on me: “Also, he came to get me. I mean, he didn’t have to. They could have stayed gone if they didn’t want me.”

Nothing more was said on the subject, and we finished the dinner talking of other things. But as I was leaving, as we were walking down the photograph-lined hallway—past Pippa’s room, with a night light burning, and Cosmo sleeping on the foot of her bed—he said, as he was opening the front door for me: “Theo.”

“Yes?”

“You have my address, and my telephone.”

“Sure.”

“Well then.” He seemed almost as uncomfortable as I was. “I hope you have a good trip. Take care of yourself.”

“You too,” I said. We looked at each other.

“Well.”

“Well. Good night, then.”

He pushed open the door, and I walked out of the house—for the last time, as I thought. But though I had no idea I’d ever be seeing him again, about this I was wrong.

II.

When we are strongest—who draws back?

Most merry—who falls down laughing?

When we are very bad,—what can they do to us?

—A

RTHUR

R

IMBAUD

Chapter 5.

Badr al-Dine

i.

THOUGH I HAD DECIDED to leave the suitcase in the package room of my old building, where I felt sure Jose and Goldie would look after it, I grew more and more nervous as the date approached until, at the last minute, I determined to go back for what now seems a fairly dumb reason: in my haste to get the painting out of the apartment, I’d thrown a lot of random things in the bag with it, including most of my summer clothes. So the day before my dad was supposed to pick me up at the Barbours’, I hurried back over to Fifty-Seventh Street with the idea of unzipping the suitcase and taking a couple of the better shirts off the top.

Jose wasn’t there, but a new, thick-shouldered guy (Marco V, according to his nametag) stepped in front of me and cut me off with a blocky, obstinate stance less like a doorman’s than a security guard’s. “Sorry, can I help you?” he said.

I explained about the suitcase. But after perusing the log—running a heavy forefinger down the column of dates—he didn’t seem inclined to go in and get it off the shelf for me. “An’ you left this here why?” he said doubtfully, scratching his nose.

“Jose said I could.”

“You got a receipt?”

“No,” I said, after a confused pause.

“Well, I can’t help you. We got no record. Besides, we don’t store packages for non-tenants.”

I’d lived in the building long enough to know that this wasn’t true, but I wasn’t about to argue the point. “Look,” I said, “I used to live here. I know Goldie and Carlos and everybody. I mean—come on,” I said, after a frigid, ill-defined pause, during which I felt his attention drifting. “If you take me back there, I can show you which one.”

“Sorry. Nobody but staff and tenants allowed in back.”

“It’s canvas with ribbon on the handle. My name’s on it, see? Decker?” I was pointing out the label still on our old mailbox for proof when Goldie strolled in from his break.

“Hey! look who’s back! This one’s my kid,” he said to Marco V. “I’ve known him since he was this high. What’s up, Theo my friend?”

“Nothing. I mean—well, I’m leaving town.”

“Oh, yeah? Out to Vegas already?” said Goldie. At his voice, his hand on my shoulder, everything had become easy and comfortable. “Some crazy place to live out there, am I right?”

“I guess so,” I said doubtfully. People kept telling me how crazy things were going to be for me in Vegas although I didn’t understand why, as I was unlikely to be spending much time in casinos or clubs.

“You guess?” Goldie rolled his eyes up and shook his head, with a drollery that my mother in moments of mischief had been apt to imitate. “Oh my God, I’m telling you. That city? The unions they got… I mean, restaurant work, hotel work… very good money, anywhere you look. And the weather? Sun—every day of the year. You’re going to love it out there, my friend. When did you say you’re leaving?”

“Um, today. I mean tomorrow. That’s why I wanted to—”

“Oh, you came for your bag? Hey, sure thing.” Goldie said something sharp-sounding in Spanish to Marco V, who shrugged blandly and headed back into the package room.

“He’s all right, Marco,” said Goldie to me in an undertone. “But, he don’t know anything about your bag here because me and Jose didn’t enter it down in the book, you know what I’m saying?”

I did know what he was saying. All packages had to be logged in and out of the building. By not tagging the suitcase, or entering it into the official record, they had been protecting me from the possibility that somebody else might show up and try to claim it.

“Hey,” I said awkwardly, “thanks for looking out for me…”

“No problemo,” said Goldie. “Hey, thanks, man,” he said loudly to Marco as he took the bag. “Like I said,” he continued in a low voice; I had to walk close beside him in order to hear—“Marco’s a good guy, but we had a lot of tenants complaining because the building was understaffed during the, you know.” He threw me a significant glance. “I mean, like Carlos couldn’t get in to work for his shift that day, I guess it wasn’t his fault, but they fired him.”

“Carlos?” Carlos was the oldest and most reserved of the doormen, like an aging Mexican matinee idol with his pencil moustache and greying temples, his black shoes polished to a high gloss and his white gloves whiter than everyone else’s. “They fired Carlos?”

“I know—unbelievable. Thirty-four years and—” Goldie jerked a thumb over his shoulder—“pfft. And now—management’s all like security-conscious, new staff, new rules, sign everybody in and out and like that—

“Anyway,” he said, as he backed into the front door, pushing it open. “Let me get you a cab, my friend. You’re going straight to the airport?”

“No—” I said, putting out a hand to stop him—I’d been so preoccupied, I hadn’t really noticed what he was doing—but he brushed me aside with a naah motion.

“No, no,” he said—hauling the bag to the curb—“it’s all right, my friend, I got it,” and I realized, in consternation, that he thought I was trying to stop him taking the bag outside because I didn’t have money to tip.

“Hey, wait up,” I said—but at the same instant, Goldie whistled and charged into the street with his hand up. “Here! Taxi!” he shouted.

I stopped in the doorway, dismayed, as the cab swooped in from the curb. “Bingo!” said Goldie, opening the back door. “How’s that for timing?” Before I could quite think how to stop him without looking like a jerk, I was being ushered into the back seat as the suitcase was hoisted into the trunk, and Goldie was slapping the roof, the friendly way he did.

“Have a good trip, amigo,” he said—looking at me, then up at the sky. “Enjoy the sunshine out there for me. You know how I am about the sunshine—I’m a tropical bird, you know? I can’t wait to go home to Puerto Rico and talk to the bees. Hmmn…” he sang, closing his eyes and putting his head to the side. “My sister has a hive of tame bees and I sing them to sleep. Do they got bees in Vegas?”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling quietly in my pockets to see if I could tell how much money I had.

“Well if you see any bees, tell ’em Goldie says hi. Tell ’em I’m coming.”

“¡Hey! ¡Espera!” It was Jose, hand up—still dressed in his soccer-playing clothes, coming to work straight from his game in the park—swaying towards me with his head-bobbing, athletic walk.

“Hey, manito, you taking off?” he said, leaning down and sticking his head in the window of the cab. “You gotta send us a picture for downstairs!” Down in the basement, where the doormen changed into their uniforms, there was a wall papered with postcards and Polaroids from Miami and Cancun, Puerto Rico and Portugal, which tenants and doormen had sent home to East Fifty-Seventh Street over the years.

“That’s right!” said Goldie. “Send us a picture! Don’t forget!”

“I—” I was going to miss them, but it seemed gay to come out and say so. So all I said was: “Okay. Take it easy.”

“You too,” said Jose, backing away with his hand up. “Stay away from them blackjack tables.”

“Hey, kid,” the cabdriver said, “you want me to take you somewhere or what?”

“Hey, hey, hold your horses, it’s cool,” said Goldie to him. To me he said: “You gonna be fine, Theo.” He gave the cab one last slap. “Good luck, man. See you around. God bless.”

ii.

“DON’T TELL ME,” MY dad said, when he arrived at the Barbours’ the next morning to pick me up in the taxi, “that you’re carrying all that shit on the plane.” For I had another suitcase beside the one with the painting, the one I’d originally planned to take.

“I think you’re going to be over your baggage allowance,” said Xandra a bit hysterically. In the poisonous heat of the sidewalk, I could smell her hair spray even where I was standing. “They only let you carry a certain amount.”

Mrs. Barbour, who had come down to the curb with me, said smoothly: “Oh, he’ll be fine with those two. I go over my limit all the time.”

“Yes, but it costs money.”

“Actually, I think you’ll find it quite reasonable,” said Mrs. Barbour. Though it was early and she was without jewelry or lipstick, somehow even in her sandals and simple cotton dress she still managed to give the impression of being immaculately turned out. “You might have to pay twenty dollars extra at the counter, but that shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”

She and my dad stared each other down like two cats. Then my father looked away. I was a little ashamed of his sports coat, which made me think of guys pictured in the Daily News under suspicion of racketeering.

“You should have told me you had two bags,” he said, sullenly, in the silence (welcome to me) that followed her helpful remark. “I don’t know if all this stuff is going to fit in the trunk.”

Standing at the curb, with the trunk of the cab open, I almost considered leaving the suitcase with Mrs. Barbour and phoning later to tell her what it contained. But before I could make up my mind to say anything, the broad-backed Russian cab driver had taken Xandra’s bag from the trunk and hoisted my second suitcase in, which—with some banging and mashing around—he made to fit.

“See, not very heavy!” he said, slamming the trunk shut, wiping his forehead. “Soft sides!”

“But my carry-on!” said Xandra, looking panicked.

“Not a problem, madame. It can ride in front seat with me. Or in the back with you, if you prefer.”

“All sorted, then,” said Mrs. Barbour—leaning to give me a quick kiss, the first of my visit, a ladies-who-lunch air kiss that smelled of mint and gardenias. “Toodle-oo, you all,” she said. “Have a fantastic trip, won’t you?” Andy and I had said our goodbyes the day before; though I knew he was sad to see me go, still my feelings were hurt that he hadn’t stayed to see me off but instead had gone with the rest of the family up to the supposedly detested house in Maine. As for Mrs. Barbour: she didn’t seem particularly upset to see the last of me, though in truth I felt sick to be leaving.

Her gray eyes, on mine, were clear and cool. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Barbour,” I said. “For everything. Tell Andy I said goodbye.”

“Certainly I will,” she said. “You were an awfully good guest, Theo.” Out in the steamy morning heat haze on Park Avenue, I stood holding her hand for a moment longer—slightly hoping that she would tell me to get in touch with her if I needed anything—but she only said, “Good luck, then,” and gave me another cool little kiss before she pulled away.

iii.

I COULDN’T QUITE FATHOM that I was leaving New York. I’d never been out of the city in my life longer than eight days. On the way to the airport, staring out the window at billboards for strip clubs and personal-injury lawyers that I wasn’t likely to see for a while, a chilling thought settled over me. What about the security check? I hadn’t flown much (only twice, once when I was in kindergarten) and I wasn’t even sure what a security check involved: x-rays? A luggage search?

“Do they open up everything in the airport?” I asked, in a timid voice—and then asked again, because nobody seemed to hear me. I was sitting in the front seat in order to ensure Dad and Xandra’s romantic privacy.

“Oh, sure,” said the cab driver. He was a beefy, big-shouldered Soviet: coarse features, sweaty red-apple cheeks, like a weightlifter gone to fat. “And if they don’t open, they x-ray.”

“Even if I check it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said reassuringly. “They are wiping for explosives, everything. Very safe.”

“But—” I tried to think of some way to formulate what I needed to ask, without betraying myself, and couldn’t.

“Not to worry,” said the driver. “Lots of police at airport. And three-four days ago? Roadblocks.”

“Well, all I can say is, I can’t fucking wait to get out of here,” Xandra said in her husky voice. For a perplexed moment, I thought she was talking to me, but when I looked back, she was turned toward my father.

My dad put his hand on her knee and said something too low for me to hear. He was wearing his tinted glasses, leaning with his head lolled back on the rear seat, and there was something loose and young-sounding in the flatness of his voice, the secret something that passed between them as he squeezed Xandra’s knee. I turned away from them and looked out at the no-man’s-land rushing past: long low buildings, bodegas and body shops, car lots simmering in the morning heat.

“See, I don’t mind sevens in the flight number,” Xandra was saying quietly. “It’s eights freak me out.”

“Yeah, but eight’s a lucky number in China. Take a look at the international board when we get to McCarran. All the incoming flights from Beijing? Eight eight eight.”

“You and your Wisdom of the Chinese.”

“Number pattern. It’s all energy. Meeting of heaven and earth.”

“ ‘Heaven and earth.’ You make it sound like magic.”

“It is.”

“Oh yeah?”

They were whispering. In the rear view mirror, their faces were goofy, and too close together; when I realized they were about to kiss (something that still shocked me, no matter how often I saw them do it), I turned to stare straight ahead. It occurred to me that if I didn’t already know how my mother had died, no power on earth could have convinced me they hadn’t murdered her.

iv.

WHILE WE WERE WAITING to get our boarding passes I was stiff with fear, fully expecting Security to open my suitcase and discover the painting right then, in the check-in line. But the grumpy woman with the shag haircut whose face I still remember (I’d been praying we wouldn’t have to go to her when it was our turn) hoisted my suitcase on the belt with hardly a glance.

As I watched it wobble away, towards personnel and procedures unknown, I felt closed-in and terrified in the bright press of strangers—conspicuous too, as if everyone was staring at me. I hadn’t been in such a dense mob or seen so many cops in one place since the day my mother died. National Guardsmen with rifles stood by the metal detectors, steady in fatigue gear, cold eyes passing over the crowd.

Backpacks, briefcases, shopping bags and strollers, heads bobbing down the terminal as far as I could see. Shuffling through the security line, I heard a shout—of my name, as I thought. I froze.

“Come on, come on,” said my dad, hopping behind me on one foot, trying to get his loafer off, elbowing me in the back, “don’t just stand there, you’re holding up the whole damn line—”

Going through the metal detector, I kept my eyes on the carpet—rigid with fear, expecting any moment a hand to fall on my shoulder. Babies cried. Old people puttered by in motorized carts. What would they do to me? Could I make them understand it wasn’t quite how it looked? I imagined some cinder-block room like in the movies, slammed doors, angry cops in shirtsleeves, forget about it, you’re not going anywhere, kid.

Once out of security, in the echoing corridor, I heard distinct, purposeful steps following close behind me. Again I stopped.

“Don’t tell me,” said my dad—turning back with an exasperated roll of his eyes. “You left something.”

“No,” I said, looking around. “I—” There was no one behind me. Passengers coursed around me on every side.

“Jeez, he’s white as a fucking sheet,” said Xandra. To my father, she said: “Is he all right?”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” said my father as he started down the corridor again. “Once he’s on the plane. It’s been a tough week for everybody.”

“Hell, if I was him, I’d be freaked about getting on a plane too,” said Xandra bluntly. “After what he’s been through.”

My father—tugging his rolling carry-on behind him, a bag my mother had bought him for his birthday several years before—stopped again.

“Poor kid,” he said—surprising me by his look of sympathy. “You’re not scared, are you?”

“No,” I said, far too fast. The last thing I wanted to do was attract anybody’s attention or look like I was even one quarter as wigged-out as I was.

He knit his brows at me, then turned away. “Xandra?” he said to her, lifting his chin. “Why don’t you give him one of those, you know.”

“Got it,” said Xandra smartly, stopping to fish in her purse, producing two large white bullet-shaped pills. One she dropped in my father’s outstretched palm, and the other she gave to me.

“Thanks,” said my dad, slipping it into the pocket of his jacket. “Let’s go get something to wash these down with, shall we? Put that away,” he said to me as I held the pill up between thumb and forefinger to marvel at how big it was.

“He doesn’t need a whole,” Xandra said, grasping my dad’s arm as she leaned sideways to adjust the strap of her platform sandal.

“Right,” said my dad. He took the pill from me, snapped it expertly in half, and dropped the other half in the pocket of his sports coat as they strolled ahead of me, tugging their luggage behind them.

v.

THE PILL WASN’T STRONG enough to knock me out, but it kept me high and happy and somersaulting in and out of air-conditioned dreams. Passengers whispered in the seats around me as a disembodied air hostess announced the results of the in-flight promotional raffle: dinner and drinks for two at Treasure Island. Her hushed promise sent me down into a dream where I swam deep in greenish-black water, some torchlit competition with Japanese children diving for a pillowcase of pink pearls. Throughout it all the plane roared bright and white and constant like the sea, though at some strange point—wrapped deep in my royal-blue blanket, dreaming somewhere high over the desert—the engines seemed to shut off and go silent and I found myself floating chest upward in zero gravity while still buckled into my chair, which had somehow drifted loose from the other seats to float freely around the cabin.

I fell back into my body with a jolt as the plane hit the runway and bounced, screaming to a stop.

“And… welcome to Lost Wages, Nevada,” the pilot was saying over the intercom. “Our local time in Sin City is 11:47 a.m.”

Half-blind in the glare, plate glass and reflecting surfaces, I trailed after Dad and Xandra through the terminal, stunned by the chatter and flash of slot machines and by the music blaring loud and incongruous so early in the day. The airport was like a mall-sized version of Times Square: towering palms, movie screens with fireworks and gondolas and showgirls and singers and acrobats.

It took a long time for my second bag to come off the carousel. Chewing my fingernails, I stared fixedly at a billboard of a grinning Komodo dragon, an ad for some casino attraction: “Over 2,000 reptiles await you.” The baggage-claim crowd was like a group of colorful stragglers in front of some third-rate nightclub: sunburns, disco shirts, tiny bejeweled Asian ladies with giant logo sunglasses. The belt was circling around mostly empty and my dad (itching for a cigarette, I could tell) was starting to stretch and pace and rub his knuckles against his cheek like he did when he wanted a drink when there it came, the last one, khaki canvas with the red label and the multicolored ribbon my mother had tied around the handle.

My dad, in one long step, lunged forward and grabbed it before I could get to it. “About time,” he said jauntily, tossing it onto the baggage cart. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”

Out we rolled through the automatic doors and into a wall of breathtaking heat. Miles of parked cars stretched around us in all directions, hooded and still. Rigidly I stared straight ahead—chrome knives glinting, horizon shimmering like wavy glass—as if looking back, or hesitating, might invite some uniformed party to step in front of us. Yet no one collared me or shouted at us to stop. No one even looked at us.

I was so disoriented in the glare that when my dad stopped in front of a new silver Lexus and said: “Okay, this is us,” I tripped and nearly fell on the curb.

“This is yours?” I said, looking between them.

“What?” said Xandra coquettishly, clumping around to the passenger side in her high shoes as my dad beeped the lock open. “You don’t like it?”

A Lexus? Every day, I was struck by all sorts of matters large and small that I urgently needed to tell my mother and as I stood dumbly watching my dad hoist the bags in the trunk my first thought was: wow, wait until she hears about this. No wonder he hadn’t sent money home.

My dad threw aside his half-smoked Viceroy with a flourish. “Okay,” he said, “hop in.” The desert air had magnetized him. Back in New York, he had looked a bit worn-out and seedy but out in the rippling heat his white sportcoat and his cult-leader sunglasses made sense.

The car—which started with the push of a button—was so quiet that at first I didn’t realize we were moving. Away we glided, into depthlessness and space. Accustomed as I was to jolting around in the backs of taxis, the smoothness and chill of the ride was sealed off, eerie: brown sand, vicious glare, trance and silence, blown trash whipping at the chain-link fence. I still felt numbed and weightless from the pill, and the crazy façades and superstructures of the Strip, the violent shimmer where the dunes met sky, made me feel as if we had touched down on another planet.

Xandra and my dad had been talking quietly in the front seat. Now she turned to me—snapping gum, robust and sunny, her jewelry blazing in the strong light. “So, whaddaya think?” she said, exhaling a strong breath of Juicy Fruit.

“It’s wild,” I said—watching a pyramid sail past my window, the Eiffel Tower, too overwhelmed to take it in.

“You think it’s wild now?” said my dad, tapping his fingernail on the steering wheel in a manner I associated with frayed nerves and late-night quarrels after he got home from the office. “Just wait until you see it lit up at night.”

“See there—check it out,” said Xandra, reaching over to point out the window on my dad’s side. “There’s the volcano. It really works.”

“Actually, I think they’re renovating it. But in theory, yeah. Hot lava. On the hour, every hour.”

“Exit to the left in point two miles,” said a woman’s computerized voice.

Carnival colors, giant clown heads and XXX signs: the strangeness exhilarated me, and also frightened me a little. In New York, everything reminded me of my mother—every taxi, every street corner, every cloud that passed over the sun—but out in this hot mineral emptiness, it was as if she had never existed; I could not even imagine her spirit looking down on me. All trace of her seemed burned away in the thin desert air.

As we drove, the improbable skyline dwindled into a wilderness of parking lots and outlet malls, loop after faceless loop of shopping plazas, Circuit City, Toys “R” Us, supermarkets and drugstores, Open Twenty-Four Hours, no saying where it ended or began. The sky was wide and trackless, like the sky over the sea. As I fought to stay awake—blinking against the glare—I was ruminating in a dazed way over the expensive-smelling leather interior of the car and thinking of a story I’d often heard my mother tell: of how, when she and my dad were dating, he’d turned up in a Porsche he’d borrowed from a friend to impress her. Only after they were married had she learned that the car wasn’t really his. She’d seemed to think this was funny—although given other, less amusing facts that came to light after their marriage (such as his arrest record, as a juvenile, on charges unknown), I wondered that she was able to find anything very entertaining about the story.

“Um, you’ve had this car how long?” I said, speaking up over their conversation in front.

“Oh—gosh—little over a year now, isn’t that right, Xan?”

A year? I was still chewing this over—this figure meant my dad had acquired the car (and Xandra) before he’d disappeared—when I looked up and saw that the strip malls had given way to an endless-seeming grid of small stucco homes. Despite the air of boxed, bleached sameness—row on row, like stones in a cemetery—some of the houses were painted in festive pastels (mint green, rancho pink, milky desert blue) and there was something excitingly foreign about the sharp shadows, the spiked desert plants. Having grown up in the city, where there was never enough space, I was if anything pleasantly surprised. It would be something new to live in a house with a yard, even if the yard was only brown rocks and cactus.

“Is this still Las Vegas?” As a game, I was trying to pick out what made the houses different from each other: an arched doorway here, a swimming pool or a palm tree there.

“You’re seeing a whole different part now,” my dad said—exhaling sharply, stubbing out his third Viceroy. “This is what tourists never see.”

Though we’d been driving a while, there were no landmarks, and it was impossible to say where we were going or in which direction. The skyline was monotonous and unchanging and I was fearful that we might drive through the pastel houses altogether and out into the alkali waste beyond, into some sun-beaten trailer park from the movies. But instead—to my surprise—the houses began to grow larger: with second stories, with cactus gardens, with fences and pools and multi-car garages.

“Okay, this is us,” said my dad, turning into a road that had an imposing granite sign with copper letters: The Ranches at Canyon Shadows.

“You live here?” I said, impressed. “Is there a canyon?”

“No, that’s just the name of it,” said Xandra.

“See, they have a bunch of different developments out here,” said my dad, pinching the bridge of his nose. I could tell by his tone—his scratchy old needing-a-drink voice—that he was tired and not in a very good mood.

“Ranch communities is what they call them,” said Xandra.

“Right. Whatever. Oh, shut the fuck up,” snapped my dad, reaching over to turn the volume down as the lady on the navigation system piped up with instructions again.

“They all have different themes, sort of,” said Xandra, who was dabbing on lip gloss with the pad of her little finger. “There’s Pueblo Breeze, Ghost Ridge, Dancing Deer Villas. Spirit Flag is the golf community? And Encantada is the fanciest, lots of investment properties—Hey, turn here, sweet pea,” she said, clutching his arm.

My dad kept driving straight and did not answer.

“Shit!” Xandra turned in her seat to look at the road receding behind us. “Why do you always have to go the long way?”

“Don’t start with the shortcuts. You’re as bad as the Lexus lady.”

“Yeah, but it’s faster. By fifteen minutes. Now we’re going to have to drive all the way around Dancing Deer.”

My dad blew out an exasperated breath. “Look—”

“What’s so hard about cutting over to Gitana Trails and making two lefts and a right? Because that’s all it is. If you get off on Desatoya—”

“Look. You want to drive the car? Or you want to let me drive the fucking car?”

I knew better than to challenge my dad when he took that tone, and apparently Xandra did too. She flounced around in her seat and—in a deliberate manner that seemed calculated to annoy him—turned up the radio very loud and started punching through static and commercials.

The stereo was so powerful I could feel it thumping through the back of my white leather seat. Vacation, all I ever wanted… Light climbed and burst through the wild desert clouds—never-ending sky, acid blue, like a computer game or a test pilot’s hallucination.

“Vegas 99, serving up the Eighties and Nineties,” said the fast, excited voice on the radio. “And here’s Pat Benatar coming up for you, in our Ladies of the Eighties Lapdance lunch.”

In Desatoya Ranch Estates, on 6219 Desert End Road, where lumber was stacked in some of the yards and sand blew in the streets, we turned into the driveway of a large Spanish-looking house, or maybe it was Moorish, shuttered beige stucco with arched gables and a clay-tiled roof pitched at various startling angles. I was impressed by the aimlessness and sprawl of it, its cornices and columns, the elaborate ironwork door with its sense of a stage set, like a house from one of the Telemundo soap operas the doormen always had going in the package room.

We got out of the car and were circling around to the garage entrance with our suitcases when I heard an eerie, distressing noise: screaming, or crying, from inside the house.

“Gosh, what’s that?” I said, dropping my bags, unnerved.

Xandra was leaning sideways, stumbling a bit in her high shoes and grappling for her key. “Oh, shut up, shut up, shutthefuckup,” she was muttering under her breath. Before she’d opened the door all the way, a hysterical stringy mop shot out, shrieking, and began to hop and dance and caper all around us.

“Get down!” Xandra was yelling. Through the half-opened door, safari music (trumpeting elephants, chattering monkeys) was playing so loud that I could hear it all the way out in the garage.

“Wow,” I said, peering inside. The air inside smelled hot and stale: old cigarette smoke, new carpet, and—no question about it—dog shit.

“For the zookeeper, big cats pose a unique series of challenges,” the voice on the television boomed. “Why don’t we follow Andrea and her staff on their morning rounds.”

“Hey,” I said, stopping in the door with my bag, “you left the television on.”

“Yes,” said Xandra—brushing past me—“that’s Animal Planet, I left it on for him. For Popper. I said get down!” she snapped at the dog, who was scrabbling at her knees with his claws as she hobbled in on her platforms and switched the television off.

“He stayed by himself?” I said, over the dog’s shrieks. He was one of those long-haired girly dogs who would have been white and fluffy if he was clean.

“Oh, he’s got a drinking fountain from Petco,” said Xandra, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand as she stepped over the dog. “And one of those big feeder things?”

“What kind is he?”

“Maltese. Pure bred. I won him in a raffle. I mean, I know he needs a bath, it’s a pain to keep them groomed. That’s right, just look what you did to my pants,” she said to the dog. “White jeans.”

We were standing in a large, open room with high ceilings and a staircase that ran up to a sort of railed mezzanine on one side—a room almost as big as the entire apartment I’d grown up in. But when my eyes adjusted from the bright sun, I was taken aback by how bare it was. Bone-white walls. Stone fireplace, with sort of a fake hunting-lodge feel. Sofa like something from a hospital waiting room. Across from the glass patio doors stretched a wall of built-in shelves, mostly empty.

My dad creaked in, and dropped the suitcases on the carpet. “Jesus, Xan, it smells like shit in here.”

Xandra—leaning over to set down her purse—winced as the dog began to jump and climb and claw all over her. “Well, Janet was supposed to come and let him out,” she said over his high-pitched screams. “She had the key and everything. God, Popper,” she said, wrinkling her nose, turning her head away, “you stink.”

The emptiness of the place stunned me. Until that moment, I had never questioned the necessity of selling my mother’s books and rugs and antiques, or the need of sending almost everything else to Goodwill or the garbage. I had grown up in a four-room apartment where closets were packed to overflowing, where every bed had boxes beneath it and pots and pans were hung from the ceiling because there wasn’t room in the cupboards. But—how easy it would have been to bring some of her things, like the silver box that had been her mother’s, or the painting of a chestnut mare that looked like a Stubbs, or even her childhood copy of Black Beauty! It wasn’t as if he couldn’t have used a few good pictures or some of the furniture she’d inherited from her parents. He had gotten rid of her things because he hated her.

“Jesus Christ,” my father was saying, his voice raised angrily over the shrill barks. “This dog has destroyed the place. Quite honestly.”

“Well, I don’t know—I mean, I know it’s a mess but Janet said—”

“I told you, you should have kennelled this dog. Or, I don’t know, taken him to the pound. I don’t like having him in the house. Outdoors is the place for him. Didn’t I tell you this was going to be a problem? Janet is such a fucking flake—”

“So he went on the rug a few times? So what? And—what the hell are you looking at?” said Xandra angrily, stepping over the shrieking dog—and with a bit of a start, I realized it was me she was glaring at.

vi.

MY NEW ROOM FELT so bare and lonely that, after I unpacked my bags, I left the sliding door of the closet open so I could see my clothes hanging inside. From downstairs, I could still hear Dad shouting about the carpet. Unfortunately, Xandra was shouting too, getting him more wound up, which (I could have told her, if she’d asked) was exactly the wrong way to handle him. At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad’s anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem ridiculous. Eventually he would whoosh out with a thunderous slam of the front door and when he returned—hours later, with a quiet click of the key in the lock—he would walk around the apartment as if nothing had happened: going to the refrigerator for a beer, asking in a perfectly normal voice where his mail was.

Of the three empty rooms upstairs I’d chosen the largest, which like a hotel room had its own tiny bathroom to the side. Floor heavily carpeted in steel blue plush. Bare mattress, with a plastic package of bedsheets at the foot. Legends Percale. Twenty percent off. A gentle mechanical hum emanated from the walls, like the hum of an aquarium filter. It seemed like the kind of room where a call girl or a stewardess would be murdered on television.

With an ear out for Dad and Xandra, I sat on the mattress with the wrapped painting on my knees. Even with the door locked, I was hesitant to take the paper off in case they came upstairs, and yet the desire to look at it was irresistible. Carefully, carefully, I scratched the tape with my thumbnail and peeled it up by the edges.

The painting slid out more easily than I’d expected, and I found myself biting back a gasp of pleasure. It was the first time I’d seen the painting in the light of day. In the arid room—all sheetrock and whiteness—the muted colors bloomed with life; and even though the surface of the painting was ghosted ever so slightly with dust, the atmosphere it breathed was like the light-rinsed airiness of a wall opposite an open window. Was this why people like Mrs. Swanson went on about the desert light? She had loved to warble on about what she called her “sojourn” in New Mexico—wide horizons, empty skies, spiritual clarity. Yet as if by some trick of the light the painting seemed transfigured, as the dark roofline view of water tanks from my mother’s bedroom window sometimes stood gilded and electrified for a few strange moments in the stormlight of late afternoon, right before a summer cloudburst.

“Theo?” My dad, knocking briskly at the door. “You hungry?”

I stood up, hoping he wouldn’t try the door and find it locked. My new room was as bare as a jail cell; but the closet had high shelves, well above my dad’s eye level, very deep.

“I’m going to pick up some Chinese. Want me to get you something?”

Would my dad know what the painting was, if he saw it? I hadn’t thought so—but looking at it in the light, the glow it threw off, I realized that any fool would. “Um, be right there,” I called, my voice false-sounding and hoarse, slipping the painting into an extra pillowcase and hiding it under the bed before hurrying out of the room.

vii.

IN THE WEEKS IN Las Vegas before school started, loitering around downstairs with the earphones of my iPod in but the sound off, I learned a number of interesting facts. For starters: my dad’s former job had not involved nearly as much business travel to Chicago and Phoenix as he had led us to believe. Unbeknownst to my mother and me, he had actually been flying out to Vegas for some months, and it was in Vegas—in an Asian-themed bar at the Bellagio—that he and Xandra had met. They had been seeing each other for a while before my dad vanished—a bit over a year, as I gathered; it seemed that they had celebrated their “anniversary” not long before my mother died, with dinner at Delmonico Steakhouse and the Jon Bon Jovi concert at the MGM Grand. (Bon Jovi! Of all the many things I was dying to tell my mother—and there were thousands of them, if not millions—it seemed terrible that she would never know this hilarious fact.)

Another thing I figured out, after a few days in the house on Desert End Road: what Xandra and my dad really meant when they said my dad had “stopped drinking” was that he’d switched from Scotch (his beverage of choice) to Corona Lights and Vicodin. I had been puzzled by how frequently the peace sign, or V for Victory, was flashed between them, in all sorts of incongruous contexts, and it might have gone on being a mystery for a lot longer if my dad hadn’t just come out and asked Xandra for a Vicodin when he thought I wasn’t listening.

I didn’t know anything about Vicodin except that it was something that a wild movie actress I liked was always getting her picture in the tabloids about: stumbling from her Mercedes as police lights flashed in the background. Several days later, I came across a plastic bag with what looked like about three hundred pills in it—sitting on the kitchen counter, alongside a bottle of my dad’s Propecia and a stack of unpaid bills—which Xandra snatched up and threw in her purse.

“What are those?” I said.

“Um, vitamins.”

“Why are they in that baggie like that?”

“I get them from this bodybuilder guy at work.”

The weird thing was—and this was something else I wished I could have discussed with my mother—the new, drugged-out Dad was a much more pleasant and predictable companion than the Dad of old. When my father drank, he was a twist of nerves—all inappropriate jokes and aggressive bursts of energy, right up until the moment he passed out—but when he stopped drinking, he was worse. He blasted along ten paces ahead of my mother and me on the sidewalk, talking to himself and patting his suit pockets as if for a weapon. He brought home stuff we didn’t want and couldn’t afford, like crocodile Manolos for my mother (who hated high heels) and not even in the right size. He lugged piles of paper home from the office and sat up past midnight drinking iced coffee and punching in numbers on the calculator, sweat pouring off him like he’d just done forty minutes on the StairMaster. Or else he would make a big deal of going to some party way the hell over in Brooklyn (“What do you mean, ‘maybe I shouldn’t go’? You think I should live like a fucking hermit, is that it?”) and then—after dragging my mother there—storm out ten minutes later after insulting someone or mocking them to their face.

This was a different, more affable energy, with the pills: a combination of sluggishness and brightness, a bemused, goofy, floating quality. His walk was looser. He napped more, nodded agreeably, lost the thread of his arguments, ambled about barefoot with his bathrobe halfway open. From his genial cursing, his infrequent shaving, the relaxed way he talked around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, it was almost as if he were playing a character: some cool guy from a fifties noir or maybe Ocean’s Eleven, a lazy, sated gangster with not much to lose. Yet even in the midst of his new laid-backness he still had that crazed and slightly heroic look of schoolboy insolence, all the more stirring since it was drifting towards autumn, half-ruined and careless of itself.

In the house on Desert End Road, which had the super-expensive cable television package my mother would never let us get, he drew the blinds against the glare and sat smoking in front of the television, glassy as an opium addict, watching ESPN with the sound off, no sport in particular, anything and everything that came on: cricket, jai alai, badminton, croquet. The air was overly chilled, with a stale, refrigerated smell; sitting motionless for hours, the filament of smoke from his Viceroy floating to the ceiling like a thread of incense, he might as well have been contemplating the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha as the leaderboard at the PGA or whatever.

What wasn’t clear was if my dad had a job—or, if he did, what kind of job it was. The phone rang all hours of the day and night. My dad went in the hallway with the handset, his back to me, bracing his arm against the wall and staring at the carpet as he talked, something in his posture suggesting the attitude of a coach at the end of a tough game. Usually he kept his voice well down but even when he didn’t, it was tough to understand his end of the conversation: vig, moneyline, odds-on favorite, straight up and against the spread. He was gone much of the time, on unexplained errands, and a lot of nights he and Xandra didn’t come home at all. “We get comped a lot at the MGM Grand,” he explained, rubbing his eyes, sinking back into the sofa cushions with an exhausted sigh—and again I got a sense of the character he was playing, moody playboy, relic of the eighties, easily bored. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s just when she’s working the late shift, it’s easier for us to crash on the Strip.”

viii.

“WHAT ARE ALL THESE papers everywhere?” I asked Xandra one day while she was in the kitchen making her white diet drink. I was confused by the pre-printed cards I kept finding all over the house: grids pencilled in with row after monotonous row of figures. Vaguely scientific-looking, they had a creepy feel of DNA sequences, or maybe spy transmissions in binary code.

She switched the blender off, flicked the hair out of her eyes. “Excuse me?”

“These work sheets or whatever.”

“Bacca-rat!” said Xandra—rolling the r, doing a tricky little fillip with her fingers.

“Oh,” I said after a flat pause, though I’d never heard the word before.

She stuck her finger in the drink, and licked it off. “We go to the baccarat salon at the MGM Grand a lot?” she said. “Your dad likes to keep track of his played games.”

“Can I go some time?”

“No. Well yeah—I guess you could,” she said, as if I’d inquired about vacation prospects in some unstable Islamic nation. “Except they’re not super-welcoming of kids in the casinos? You’re not really allowed to come and watch us play.”

So what, I thought. Standing around and watching Dad and Xandra gamble was scarcely my idea of fun. Aloud, I said: “But I thought they had tigers and pirate boats and things like that.”

“Yeah, well. I guess.” She was reaching up for a glass on the shelf, exposing a quadrangle of blue-inked Chinese characters between her T-shirt and her low-slung jeans. “They tried to sell this whole family-friendly package a few years ago, but it didn’t wash.”

ix.

I MIGHT HAVE LIKED Xandra in other circumstances—which, I guess, is sort of like saying I might have liked the kid who beat me up if he hadn’t beat me up. She was my first inkling that women over forty—women maybe not all that great-looking to start with—could be sexy. Though she wasn’t pretty in the face (bullet eyes, blunt little nose, tiny teeth) still she was in shape, she worked out, and her arms and legs were so glossy and tan that they looked almost sprayed, as if she anointed herself with lots of creams and oils. Teetering in her high shoes, she walked fast, always tugging at her too-short skirt, a forward-leaning walk, weirdly alluring. On some level, I was repelled by her—by her stuttery voice, her thick, shiny lip gloss that came in a tube that said Lip Glass; by the multiple pierce holes in her ears and the gap in her front teeth that she liked to worry with her tongue—but there was something sultry and exciting and tough about her too: an animal strength, a purring, prowling quality when she was out of her heels and walking barefoot.

Vanilla Coke, vanilla Chapstick, vanilla diet drink, Stoli Vanilla. Off from work, she dressed like sort of a rapped-up tennis mom, short white skirts, lots of gold jewelry. Even her tennis shoes were new and spanking white. Sunbathing by the pool, she wore a white crocheted bikini; her back was wide but thin, lots of ribs, like a man without his shirt on. “Uh-oh, wardrobe malfunction,” she said when she sat up from the lounge chair without remembering to fasten her top, and I saw that her breasts were as tan as the rest of her.

She liked reality shows: Survivor, American Idol. She liked to shop at Intermix and Juicy Couture. She liked to call her friend Courtney and “vent,” and a lot of her venting, unfortunately, was on the subject of me. “Can you believe it?” I heard her saying on the telephone when my dad was out of the house one day. “I didn’t sign on for this. A kid? Hello?

“Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass, all right,” she continued, inhaling lazily on her Marlboro Light—pausing by the glass doors that led to the pool, staring down at her freshly painted, honeydew-green toenails. “No,” she said after a brief pause. “I don’t know how long for. I mean, what does he expect me to think? I’m not a freaking soccer mom.”

Her complaints seemed routine, not particularly heated or personal. Still it was hard to know just how to make her like me. Previously, I had operated on the assumption that mom-aged women loved it when you stood around and tried to talk to them but with Xandra I soon learned that it was better not to joke around or inquire too much about her day when she came home in a bad mood. Sometimes, when it was just the two of us, she switched the channel from ESPN and we sat eating fruit cocktail and watching movies on Lifetime peacefully enough. But when she was annoyed with me, she had a cold way of saying “Apparently” in answer to almost anything I said, making me feel stupid.

“Um, I can’t find the can opener.”

“Apparently.”

“There’s going to be a lunar eclipse tonight.”

“Apparently.”

“Look, sparks are coming out of the wall socket.”

“Apparently.”

Xandra worked nights. Usually she breezed off around three thirty in the afternoon, dressed in her curvy work uniform: black jacket, black pants made of some stretchy, tight-fitting material, with her blouse unbuttoned to her freckled breastbone. The nametag pinned to her blazer said XANDRA in big letters and underneath: Florida. In New York, when we’d been out at dinner that night, she’d told me that she was trying to break into real estate but what she really did, I soon learned, was manage a bar called “Nickels” in a casino on the Strip. Sometimes she came home with plastic platters of bar snacks wrapped in cellophane, things like meatballs and chicken teriyaki bites, which she and my dad carried in front of the television and ate with the sound off.

Living with them was like living with roommates I didn’t particularly get along with. When they were at home, I stayed in my room with the door shut. And when they were gone—which was most of the time—I prowled through the farther reaches of the house, trying to get used to its openness. Many of the rooms were bare of furniture, or almost bare, and the open space, the uncurtained brightness—all exposed carpet and parallel planes—made me feel slightly unmoored.

And yet it was a relief not to feel constantly exposed, or onstage, the way I had at the Barbours’. The sky was a rich, mindless, never-ending blue, like a promise of some ridiculous glory that wasn’t really there. No one cared that I never changed my clothes and wasn’t in therapy. I was free to goof off, lie in bed all morning, watch five Robert Mitchum movies in a row if I felt like it.

Dad and Xandra kept their bedroom door locked—which was too bad, as that was the room where Xandra kept her laptop, off-limits to me unless she was home and she brought it down for me to use in the living room. Poking around when they were out of the house, I found real estate leaflets, new wineglasses still in the box, a stack of old TV Guides, a cardboard box of beat-up trade paperbacks: Your Moon Signs, The South Beach Diet, Caro’s Book of Poker Tells, Lovers and Players by Jackie Collins.

The houses around us were empty—no neighbors. Five or six houses down, on the opposite side of the street, there was an old Pontiac parked out front. It belonged to a tired-looking woman with big boobs and ratty hair whom I sometimes saw standing barefoot out in front of her house in the late afternoon, clutching a pack of cigarettes and talking on her cell phone. I thought of her as “the Playa” as the first time I’d seen her, she’d been wearing a T-shirt that said DON’T HATE THE PLAYA, HATE THE GAME. Apart from her, the Playa, the only other living person I’d seen on our street was a big-bellied man in a black sports shirt way the hell down at the cul-de-sac, wheeling a garbage can out to the curb (although I could have told him: no garbage pickup on our street. When it was time to take the trash out, Xandra made me sneak out with the bag and throw it in the dumpster of the abandoned-under-construction house a few doors down). At night—apart from our house, and the Playa’s—complete darkness reigned on the street. It was all as isolated as a book we’d read in the third grade about pioneer children on the Nebraska prairie, except with no siblings or friendly farm animals or Ma and Pa.

The hardest thing, by far, was being stuck in the middle of nowhere—no movie theaters or libraries, not even a corner store. “Isn’t there a bus or something?” I asked Xandra one evening when she was in the kitchen unwrapping the night’s plastic tray of Atomic Wings and blue cheese dip.

“Bus?” said Xandra, licking a smear of barbecue sauce off her finger.

“Don’t you have public transportation out here?”

“Nope.”

“What do people do?”

Xandra cocked her head to the side. “They drive?” she said, as if I was a retard who’d never heard of cars.

One thing: there was a pool. My first day I’d burned myself brick red within an hour and suffered a sleepless night on scratchy new sheets. After that, I only went out after the sun started going down. The twilights out there were florid and melodramatic, great sweeps of orange and crimson and Lawrence-in-the-desert vermilion, then night dropping dark and hard like a slammed door. Xandra’s dog Popper—who lived, for the most part, in a brown plastic igloo on the shady side of the fence—ran back and forth along the side of the pool yapping as I floated on my back, trying to pick out constellations I knew in the confusing white spatter of stars: Lyra, Cassiopeia the queen, whiplash Scorpius with the twin stings in his tail, all the friendly childhood patterns that had twinkled me to sleep from the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on my bedroom ceiling back in New York. Now, transfigured—cold and glorious like deities with their disguises flung off—it was as if they’d flown through the roof and into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes.

x.

MY SCHOOL STARTED THE second week of August. From a distance, the fenced complex of long, low, sand-colored buildings, connected by roofed walkways, made me think of a minimum security prison. But once I stepped through the doors, the brightly colored posters and the echoing hallway were like falling back into a familiar old dream of school: crowded stairwells, humming lights, biology classroom with an iguana in a piano-sized tank; locker-lined hallways that were familiar like a set from some much-watched television show—and though the resemblance to my old school was only superficial, on some strange wavelength it was also comforting and real.

The other section of Honors English was reading Great Expectations. Mine was reading Walden; and I hid myself in the coolness and silence of the book, a refuge from the sheet-metal glare of the desert. During the morning break (where we were rounded up and made to go outside, in a chain-fenced yard near the vending machines), I stood in the shadiest corner I could find with my mass-market paperback and, with a red pencil, went through and underlined a lot of particularly bracing sentences: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” “A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.” What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

At my school, the sense of transience was unsettling. There were a lot of army brats, a lot of foreigners—many of them the children of executives who had come to Las Vegas for big managerial and construction jobs. Some of them had lived in nine or ten different states in as many years, and many of them had lived abroad: in Sydney, Caracas, Beijing, Dubai, Taipei. There were also a good many shy, half-invisible boys and girls whose parents had fled rural hardship for jobs as hotel busboys and chambermaids. In this new ecosystem money, or even good looks, did not seem to determine popularity; what mattered most, as I came to realize, was who’d lived in Vegas the longest, which was why the knock-down Mexican beauties and itinerant construction heirs sat alone at lunch while the bland, middling children of local realtors and car dealers were the cheerleaders and class presidents, the unchallenged elite of the school.

The days were clear and beautiful; and, as September rolled around, the hateful glare gave way to a certain luminosity, a dusty, golden quality. Sometimes I ate lunch at the Spanish Table, to practice my Spanish; sometimes I ate lunch at the German Table even though I didn’t speak German because several of the German II kids—children of Deutsche Bank and Lufthansa executives—had grown up in New York. Of my classes, English was the only one I looked forward to, yet I was disturbed by how many of my classmates disliked Thoreau, railed against him even, as if he (who claimed never to have learned anything of value from an old person) was an enemy and not a friend. His scorn of commerce—invigorating to me—nettled a lot of the more vocal kids in Honors English. “Yeah, right,” shouted an obnoxious boy whose hair was gelled and combed stiff like a Dragon Ball Z character—“some kind of world it would be if everybody just dropped out and moped around in the woods—”

“Me, me, me,” whined a voice in the back.

“It’s antisocial,” a loudmouth girl interjected eagerly over the laughter that followed this—shifting in her seat, turning back to the teacher (a limp, long-boned woman named Mrs. Spear, who always wore brown sandals and earthtone colors, and looked as if she was suffering from major depression). “Thoreau is always just sitting around on his can telling us how good he has it—”

“—Because,” said the Dragon Ball Z boy—his voice rising gleefully, “if everybody dropped out, like he’s saying to do? What kind of community would we have, if it was just people like him? We wouldn’t have hospitals and stuff. We wouldn’t have roads.”

“Twat,” mumbled a welcome voice—just loud enough for everybody around to hear.

I turned to see who had said this: the burnout-looking boy across the aisle, slouched and drumming his desk with his fingers. When he saw me looking at him, he raised a surprisingly lively eyebrow, as if to say: can you believe these fucking idiots?

“Did someone have something to say back there?” said Mrs. Spear.

“Like Thoreau gave a toss about roads,” said the burnout boy. His accent took me by surprise: foreign, I couldn’t place it.

“Thoreau was the first environmentalist,” said Mrs. Spear.

“He was also the first vegetarian,” said a girl in back.

“Figures,” said someone else. “Mr. Crunchy-chewy.”

“You’re all totally missing my point,” the Dragon Ball Z boy said excitedly. “Somebody has to build roads and not just sit in the woods looking at ants and mosquitoes all day. It’s called civilization.”

My neighbor let out a sharp, contemptuous bark of a laugh. He was pale and thin, not very clean, with lank dark hair falling in his eyes and the unwholesome wanness of a runaway, callused hands and black-circled nails chewed to the nub—not like the shiny-haired, ski-tanned skate rats from my school on the Upper West Side, punks whose dads were CEOs and Park Avenue surgeons, but a kid who might conceivably be sitting on a sidewalk somewhere with a stray dog on a rope.

“Well, to address some of these questions? I’d like for everybody to turn back to page fifteen,” Mrs. Spear said. “Where Thoreau is talking about his experiment in living.”

“Experiment how?” said Dragon Ball Z. “Why is living in the woods like he does any different from a caveman?”

The dark-haired boy scowled and sank deeper in his seat. He reminded me of the homeless-looking kids who stood around passing cigarettes back and forth on St. Mark’s Place, comparing scars, begging for change—same torn-up clothes and scrawny white arms; same black leather bracelets tangled at the wrists. Their multi-layered complexity was a sign I couldn’t read, though the general import was clear enough: different tribe, forget about it, I’m way too cool for you, don’t even try to talk to me. Such was my mistaken first impression of the only friend I made when I was in Vegas, and—as it turned out—one of the great friends of my life.

His name was Boris. Somehow we found ourselves standing together in the crowd that was waiting for the bus after school that day.

“Hah. Harry Potter,” he said, as he looked me over.

“Fuck you,” I said listlessly. It was not the first time, in Vegas, I’d heard the Harry Potter comment. My New York clothes—khakis, white oxford shirts, the tortoiseshell glasses which I unfortunately needed to see—made me look like a freak at a school where most people dressed in tank tops and flip flops.

“Where’s your broomstick?”

“Left it at Hogwarts,” I said. “What about you? Where’s your board?”

“Eh?” he said, leaning in to me and cupping his hand behind his ear with an old-mannish, deaf-looking gesture. He was half a head taller than me; along with jungle boots and bizarre old fatigues with the knees busted out, he was wearing a ratted-up black T-shirt with a snowboarding logo, Never Summer in white gothic letters.

“Your shirt,” I said, with a curt nod. “Not much boarding in the desert.”

“Nyah,” said Boris, pushing the stringy dark hair out of his eyes. “I don’t know how to snowboard. I just hate the sun.”

We ended up together on the bus, in the seat closest to the door—clearly an unpopular place to sit, judging from the urgent way other kids muscled and pushed to the rear, but I hadn’t grown up riding a school bus and apparently neither had he, as he too seemed to think it only natural to fling himself down in the first empty seat up front. For a while we didn’t say much, but it was a long ride and eventually we got talking. It turned out that he lived in Canyon Shadows too—but farther out, the end that was getting reclaimed by the desert, where a lot of the houses weren’t finished and sand stood in the streets.

“How long have you been here?” I asked him. It was the question all the kids asked each other at my new school, like we were doing jail time.

“Dunno. Two months maybe?” Though he spoke English fluently enough, with a strong Australian accent, there was also a dark, slurry undercurrent of something else: a whiff of Count Dracula, or maybe it was KGB agent. “Where are you from?”

“New York,” I said—and was gratified at his silent double-take, his lowered eyebrows that said: very cool. “What about you?”

He pulled a face. “Well, let’s see,” he said, slumping back in his seat and counting off the countries on his fingers. “I’ve lived in Russia, Scotland which was maybe cool but I don’t remember it, Australia, Poland, New Zealand, Texas for two months, Alaska, New Guinea, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Ukraine—”

“Jesus Christ.”

He shrugged. “Mostly Australia, Russia, and Ukraine, though. Those three places.”

“Do you speak Russian?”

He made a gesture that I took to mean more or less. “Ukrainian too, and Polish. Though I’ve forgotten a lot. The other day, I tried to remember what was the word for ‘dragonfly’ and couldn’t.”

“Say something.”

He obliged, something spitty and guttural.

“What does that mean?”

He chortled. “It means ‘Fuck you up the ass.’ ”

“Yeah? In Russian?”

He laughed, exposing grayish and very un-American teeth. “Ukrainian.”

“I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine.”

“Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They’re not so different languages, the two. Well—” click of the tongue, eye roll—“not so very much. Numbers are different, days of the week, some vocabulary. My name is spelled different in Ukrainian but in North America it’s easier to use Russian spelling and be Boris, not B-o-r-y-s. In the West everybody knows Boris Yeltsin…” he ticked his head to one side—“Boris Becker—”

“Boris Badenov—”

“Eh?” he said sharply, turning as if I’d insulted him.

“Bullwinkle? Boris and Natasha?”

“Oh, yes. Prince Boris! War and Peace. I’m named like him. Although the surname of Prince Boris is Drubetskóy, not what you said.”

“So what’s your first language? Ukrainian?”

He shrugged. “Polish maybe,” he said, falling back in his seat, slinging his dark hair to one side with a flip of his head. His eyes were hard and humorous, very black. “My mother was Polish, from Rzeszów near the Ukrainian border. Russian, Ukrainian—Ukraine as you know was satellite of USSR, so I speak both. Maybe not Russian quite so much—it’s best for swearing and cursing. With Slavic languages—Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, even Czech—if you know one, you sort of get drift in all. But for me, English is easiest now. Used to be the other way around.”

“What do you think about America?”

“Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.”

He was, like me, an only child. His father (born in Siberia, a Ukrainian national from Novoagansk) was in mining and exploration. “Big important job—he travels the world.” Boris’s mother—his father’s second wife—was dead.

“Mine too,” I said.

He shrugged. “She’s been dead for donkey’s years,” he said. “She was an alkie. She was drunk one night and she fell out a window and died.”

“Wow,” I said, a bit stunned by how lightly he’d tossed this off.

“Yah, it sucks,” he said carelessly, looking out the window.

“So what nationality are you?” I said, after a brief silence.

“Eh—?”

“Well, if your mother’s Polish, and your dad’s Ukrainian, and you were born in Australia, that would make you—”

“Indonesian,” he said, with a sinister smile. He had dark, devilish, very expressive eyebrows that moved around a lot when he spoke.

“How’s that?”

“Well, my passport says Ukraine. And I have part citizenship in Poland too. But Indonesia is the place I want to get back to,” said Boris, tossing the hair out of his eyes. “Well—PNG.”

“What?”

“Papua, New Guinea. It’s my favorite place I’ve lived.”

“New Guinea? I thought they had headhunters.”

“Not any more. Or not so many. This bracelet is from there,” he said, pointing to one of the many black leather strands on his wrist. “My friend Bami made it for me. He was our cook.”

“What’s it like?”

“Not so bad,” he said, glancing at me sideways in his brooding, self-amused way. “I had a parrot. And a pet goose. And, was learning to surf. But then, six months ago, my dad hauled me with him to this shaddy town in Alaska. Seward Peninsula, just below Arctic Circle? And then, middle of May—we flew to Fairbanks on a prop plane, and then we came here.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Dead boring up there,” said Boris. “Heaps of dead fish, and bad Internet connection. I should have run away—I wish I had,” he said bitterly.

“And done what?”

“Stayed in New Guinea. Lived on the beach. Thank God anyway we weren’t there all winter. Few years ago, we were up north in Canada, in Alberta, this one-street town off the Pouce Coupe River? Dark the whole time, October to March, and fuck-all to do except read and listen to CBC radio. Had to drive fifty klicks to do our washing. Still—” he laughed—“loads better than Ukraine. Miami Beach, compared.”

“What does your dad do again?”

“Drink, mainly,” said Boris sourly.

“He should meet my dad, then.”

Again the sudden, explosive laugh—almost like he was spitting over you. “Yes. Brilliant. And whores?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” I said, after a small, startled pause. Though not too much my dad did shocked me, I had never quite envisioned him hanging out in the Live Girls and Gentlemen’s Club joints we sometimes passed on the highway.

The bus was emptying out; we were only a few streets from my house. “Hey, this is my stop up here,” I said.

“Want to come home with me and watch television?” said Boris.

“Well—”

“Oh, come on. No one’s there. And I’ve got S.O.S. Iceberg on DVD.”

xi.

THE SCHOOL BUS DIDN’T actually go all the way out to the edge of Canyon Shadows, where Boris lived. It was a twenty minute walk to his house from the last stop, in blazing heat, through streets awash with sand. Though there were plenty of Foreclosure and “For Sale” signs on my street (at night, the sound of a car radio travelled for miles)—still, I was not aware quite how eerie Canyon Shadows got at its farthest reaches: a toy town, dwindling out at desert’s edge, under menacing skies. Most of the houses looked as if they had never been lived in. Others—unfinished—had raw-edged windows without glass in them; they were covered with scaffolding and grayed with blown sand, with piles of concrete and yellowing construction material out front. The boarded-up windows gave them a blind, battered, uneven look, as of faces beaten and bandaged. As we walked, the air of abandonment grew more and more disturbing, as if we were roaming some planet depopulated by radiation or disease.

“They built this shit way too far out,” said Boris. “Now the desert is taking it back. And the banks.” He laughed. “Fuck Thoreau, eh?”

“This whole town is like a big Fuck You to Thoreau.”

“I’ll tell you who’s fucked. People who own these houses. Can’t even get water out to a lot of them. They all get taken back because people can’t pay—that’s why my dad rents our place so bloody cheap.”

“Huh,” I said, after a slight, startled pause. It had not occurred to me to wonder how my father had been able to afford quite such a big house as ours.

“My dad digs mines,” said Boris unexpectedly.

“Sorry?”

He raked the sweaty dark hair out of his face. “People hate us, everywhere we go. Because they promise the mine won’t harm the environment, and then the mine harms the environment. But here—” he shrugged in a fatalistic, Russianate way—“my God, this fucking sand pit, who cares?”

“Huh,” I said, struck by the way our voices carried down the deserted street, “it’s really empty down here, isn’t it?”

“Yes. A graveyard. Only one other family living here—those people, down there. Big truck out front, see? Illegal immigrants, I think.”

“You and your dad are legal, right?” It was a problem at school: some of the kids weren’t; there were posters about it in the hallways.

He made a pfft, ridiculous sound. “Of course. The mine takes care of it. Or somebody. But those people down there? Maybe twenty, thirty of them, all men, all living in one house. Drug dealers maybe.”

“You think?”

“Something very funny going on,” said Boris darkly. “That’s all I know.”

Boris’s house—flanked by two vacant lots overflowing with garbage—was much like Dad and Xandra’s: wall-to-wall carpet, spanking-new appliances, same floor plan, not much furniture. But indoors, it was much too warm for comfort; the pool was dry, with a few inches of sand at the bottom, and there was no pretense of a yard, not even cactuses. All the surfaces—the appliances, the counters, the kitchen floor—were lightly filmed with grit.

“Something to drink?” said Boris, opening the refrigerator to a gleaming rank of German beer bottles.

“Oh, wow, thanks.”

“In New Guinea,” said Boris, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, “when I lived there, yah? We had a bad flood. Snakes… very dangerous and scary… unexploded mine shells from Second World War floating up in the yard… many geese died. Anyway—” he said, cracking open a beer—“all our water went bad. Typhus. All we had was beer—Pepsi was all gone, Lucozade was all gone, iodine tablets gone, three whole weeks, my dad and me, even the Muslims, nothing to drink but beer! Lunch, breakfast, everything.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

He made a face. “Had a headache the whole time. Local beer, in New Guinea—very bad tasting. This is the good stuff! There’s vodka in the freezer too.”

I started to say yes, to impress him, but then I thought of the heat and the walk home and said, “No thanks.”

He clinked his bottle against mine. “I agree. Much too hot to drink it in the day. My dad drinks it so much the nerves are gone dead in his feet.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s called—” he screwed up his face, in an effort to get the words out—“peripheral neuropathy” (pronounced, by him, as “peripheral neuropathy”). “In Canada, in hospital, they had to teach him to walk again. He stood up—he fell on the floor—his nose is bleeding—hilarious.”

“Sounds entertaining,” I said, thinking of the time I’d seen my own dad crawling on his hands and knees to get ice from the fridge.

“Very. What does yours drink? Your dad?”

“Scotch. When he drinks. Supposedly he’s quit now.”

“Hah,” said Boris, as if he’d heard this one before. “My dad should switch—good Scotch is very cheap here. Say, want to see my room?”

I was expecting something on the order of my own room, and I was surprised when he opened the door into a sort of ragtag tented space, reeking of stale Marlboros, books piled everywhere, old beer bottles and ashtrays and heaps of old towels and unwashed clothes spilling over on the carpet. The walls billowed with printed fabric—yellow, green, indigo, purple—and a red hammer-and-sickle flag hung over the batik-draped mattress. It was as if a Russian cosmonaut had crashed in the jungle and fashioned himself a shelter of his nation’s flag and whatever native sarongs and textiles he could find.

“You did this?” I said.

“I fold it up and put it in a suitcase,” said Boris, throwing himself down on the wildly-colored mattress. “Takes only ten minutes to put it up again. Do you want to watch S.O.S. Iceberg?”

“Sure.”

“Awesome movie. I’ve seen it six times. Like when she gets in her plane to rescue them on the ice?”

But somehow we never got around to watching S.O.S. Iceberg that afternoon, maybe because we couldn’t stop talking long enough to go downstairs and turn on the television. Boris had had a more interesting life than any person of my own age I had ever met. It seemed that he had only infrequently attended school, and those of the very poorest sort; out in the desolate places where his dad worked, often there were no schools for him to go to. “There are tapes?” he said, swigging his beer with one eye on me. “And tests to take. Except you have to be in a place with Internet and sometimes like far up in Canada or Ukraine we don’t have that.”

“So what do you do?”

He shrugged. “Read a lot, I guess.” A teacher in Texas, he said, had pulled a syllabus off the Internet for him.

“They must have had a school in Alice Springs.”

Boris laughed. “Sure they did,” he said, blowing a sweaty strand of hair out of his face. “But after my mum died, we lived in Northern Territory for a while—Arnhem Land—town called Karmeywallag? Town, so called. Miles in the middle of nowhere—trailers for the miners to live in and a petrol station with a bar in back, beer and whiskey and sandwiches. Anyway, wife of Mick that ran the bar, Judy her name was? All I did—” he took a messy slug of his beer—“all I did, every day, was watch soaps with Judy and stay behind the bar with her at night while my dad and his crew from the mine got thrashed. Couldn’t even get television during monsoon. Judy kept her tapes in the fridge so they wouldn’t get ruined.”

“Ruined how?”

“Mold growing in the wet. Mold on your shoes, on your books.” He shrugged. “Back then I didn’t talk so much as I do now, because I didn’t speak English so well. Very shy, sat alone, stayed always to myself. But Judy? She talked to me anyway, and was kind, even though I didn’t understand a lick of what she said. Every morning I would go to her, she would cook me my same nice fry. Rain rain rain. Sweeping, washing dishes, helping to clean the bar. Everywhere I followed like a baby goose. This is cup, this is broom, this is bar stool, this pencil. That was my school. Television—Duran Duran tapes and Boy George—everything in English. McLeod’s Daughters was her favorite programme. Always we watched together, and when I didn’t know something? She explained to me. And we talked about the sisters, and we cried when Claire died in the car wreck, and she said if she had a place like Drover’s? she would take me to live there and be happy together and we would have all women to work for us like the McLeods. She was very young and pretty. Curly blonde hair and blue stuff on her eyes. Her husband called her slut and horse’s arse but I thought she looked like Jodi on the show. All day long she talked to me and sang—taught me the words of all the jukebox songs. ‘Dark in the city, the night is alive…’ Soon I had developed quite proficiency. Speak English, Boris! I had a little English from school in Poland, hello excuse me thank you very much, but two months with her I was chatter chatter chatter! Never stopped talking since! She was very nice and kind to me always. Even though she went in the kitchen and cried every day because she hated Karmeywallag so much.”

It was getting late, but still hot and bright out. “Say, I’m starving,” said Boris, standing up and stretching so that a band of stomach showed between his fatigues and ragged shirt: concave, dead white, like a starved saint’s.

“What’s to eat?”

“Bread and sugar.”

“You’re kidding.”

Boris yawned, wiped red eyes. “You never ate bread with sugar poured on it?”

“Nothing else?”

He gave a weary-looking shrug. “I have a coupon for pizza. Fat lot of good. They don’t deliver this far out.”

“I thought you had a cook where you used to live.”

“Yah, we did. In Indonesia. Saudi Arabia too.” He was smoking a cigarette—I’d refused the one he offered me; he seemed a little trashed, drifting and bopping around the room like there was music on, although there wasn’t. “Very cool guy named Abdul Fataah. That means ‘Servant of the Opener of the Gates of Sustenance.’ ”

“Well, look. Let’s go to my house, then.”

He flung himself down on the bed with his hands between his knees. “Don’t tell me the slag cooks.”

“No, but she works in a bar with a buffet. Sometimes she brings home food and stuff.”

“Brilliant,” said Boris, reeling slightly as he stood. He’d had three beers and was working on a fourth. At the door, he took an umbrella and handed me one.

“Um, what’s this for?”

He opened it and stepped outside. “Cooler to walk under,” he said, his face blue in the shade. “And no sunburn.”

xii.

BEFORE BORIS, I HAD borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was. And I suppose if either of us had lived in an even halfway normal household, with curfews and chores and adult supervision, we wouldn’t have become quite so inseparable, so fast, but almost from that day we were together all the time, scrounging our meals and sharing what money we had.

In New York, I had grown up around a lot of worldly kids—kids who’d lived abroad and spoke three or four languages, who did summer programs at Heidelberg and spent their holidays in places like Rio or Innsbruck or Cap d’Antibes. But Boris—like an old sea captain—put them all to shame. He had ridden a camel; he had eaten witchetty grubs, played cricket, caught malaria, lived on the street in Ukraine (“but for two weeks only”), set off a stick of dynamite by himself, swum in Australian rivers infested with crocodiles. He had read Chekhov in Russian, and authors I’d never heard of in Ukrainian and Polish. He had endured midwinter darkness in Russia where the temperature dropped to forty below: endless blizzards, snow and black ice, the only cheer the green neon palm tree that burned twenty-four hours a day outside the provincial bar where his father liked to drink. Though he was only a year older than me—fifteen—he’d had actual sex with a girl, in Alaska, someone he’d bummed a cigarette off in the parking lot of a convenience store. She’d asked him if he wanted to sit in her car with her, and that was that. (“But you know what?” he said, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “I don’t think she liked it very much.”

“Did you?”

“God, yes. Although, I’m telling you, I know I wasn’t doing it right. I think was too cramped in the car.”)

Every day, we rode home on the bus together. At the half-finished Community Center on the edge of Desatoya Estates, where the doors were padlocked and the palm trees stood dead and brown in the planters, there was an abandoned playground where we bought sodas and melted candy bars from the dwindling stock in the vending machines, sat around outside on the swings, smoking and talking. His bad tempers and black moods, which were frequent, alternated with unsound bursts of hilarity; he was wild and gloomy, he could make me laugh sometimes until my sides ached, and we always had so much to say that we often lost track of time and stayed outside talking until well past dark. In Ukraine, he had seen an elected official shot in the stomach walking to his car—just happened to witness it, not the shooter, just the broad-shouldered man in a too-small overcoat falling to his knees in darkness and snow. He told me about his tiny tin-roof school near the Chippewa reservation in Alberta, sang nursery songs in Polish for me (“For homework, in Poland, we are usually learning a poem or song by heart, a prayer maybe, something like that”) and taught me to swear in Russian (“This is the true mat—from the gulags”). He told me too how, in Indonesia, he had been converted to Islam by his friend Bami the cook: giving up pork, fasting during Ramadan, praying to Mecca five times a day. “But I’m not Muslim any more,” he explained, dragging his toe in the dust. We were lying on our backs on the merry-go-round, dizzy from spinning. “I gave it up a while back.”

“Why?”

“Because I drink.” (This was the understatement of the year; Boris drank beer the way other kids drank Pepsi, starting pretty much the instant we came home from school.)

“But who cares?” I said. “Why does anybody have to know?”

He made an impatient noise. “Because is wrong to profess faith if I don’t observe properly. Disrespectful to Islam.”

“Still. ‘Boris of Arabia.’ It has a ring.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, seriously,” I said, laughing, raising up on my elbows. “Did you really believe in all that?”

“All what?”

“You know. Allah and Muhammad. ‘There is no God but God’—?”

“No,” he said, a bit angrily, “my Islam was a political thing.”

“What, you mean like the shoe bomber?”

He snorted with laughter. “Fuck, no. Besides, Islam doesn’t teach violence.”

“Then what?”

He came up off the merry-go-round, alert gaze: “What do you mean, what? What are you trying to say?”

“Back off! I’m asking a question.”

“Which is—?”

“If you converted to it and all, then what did you believe?”

He fell back and chortled as if I’d let him off the hook. “Believe? Ha! I don’t believe in anything.”

“What? You mean now?”

“I mean never. Well—the Virgin Mary, a little. But Allah and God…? not so much.”

“Then why the hell did you want to be Muslim?”

“Because—” he held out his hands, as he did sometimes when he was at a loss—“such wonderful people, they were all so friendly to me!”

“That’s a start.”

“Well, it was, really. They gave me an Arabic name—Badr al-Dine. Badr is moon, it means something like moon of faithfulness, but they said, ‘Boris, you are badr because you light everywhere, being Muslim now, lighting the world with your religion, you shine wherever you go.’ I loved it, being Badr. Also, the mosque was brilliant. Falling-down palace—stars shining through at night—birds in the roof. An old Javanese man taught us the Koran. And they fed me too, and were kind, and made sure I was clean and had clean clothes. Sometimes I fell asleep on my prayer rug. And at salah, near dawn, when the birds woke up, always the sound of wings beating!”

Though his Australo-Ukrainian accent was certainly very odd, he was almost as fluent in English as I was; and considering what a short time he’d lived in America he was reasonably conversant in amerikanskii ways. He was always poring through his torn-up pocket dictionary (his name scrawled in Cyrillic on the front, with the English carefully lettered beneath: BORYS VOLODYMYROVYCH PAVLIKOVSKY) and I was always finding old 7-Eleven napkins and bits of scratch paper with lists of words and terms he’d made:

bridle and domesticate

celerity

trattoria

wise guy = Kpymo aaH

propinquity

Dereliction of duty.

When his dictionary failed him, he consulted me. “What is Sophomore?” he asked me, scanning the bulletin board in the halls at school. “Home Ec? Poly Sci?” (pronounced, by him, as “politzei”). He had never heard of most of the food in the cafeteria lunch: fajitas, falafel, turkey tetrazzini. Though he knew a lot about movies and music, he was decades behind the times; he didn’t have a clue about sports or games or television, and—apart from a few big European brands like Mercedes and BMW—couldn’t tell one car from another. American money confused him, and sometimes too American geography: in what province was California located? Could I tell him which city was the capital of New England?

But he was used to being on his own. Cheerfully he got himself up for school, hitched his own rides, signed his own report cards, shoplifted his own food and school supplies. Once every week or so we walked miles out of our way in the suffocating heat, shaded beneath umbrellas like Indonesian tribesmen, to catch the poky local bus called the CAT, which as far as I could tell no one rode out our way except drunks, people too poor to have a car, and kids. It ran infrequently, and if we missed it we had to stand around for a while waiting for the next bus, but among its stops was a shopping plaza with a chilly, gleaming, understaffed supermarket where Boris stole steaks for us, butter, boxes of tea, cucumbers (a great delicacy for him), packages of bacon—even cough syrup once, when I had a cold—slipping them in the cutaway lining of his ugly gray raincoat (a man’s coat, much too big for him, with drooping shoulders and a grim Eastern Bloc look about it, a suggestion of food rationing and Soviet-era factories, industrial complexes in Lviv or Odessa). As he wandered around I stood lookout at the head of the aisle, so shaky with nerves I sometimes worried I would black out—but soon I was filling my own pockets with apples and chocolate (other favored food items of Boris’s) before walking up brazenly to the counter to buy bread and milk and other items too big to steal.

Back in New York, when I was eleven or so, my mother had signed me up for a Kids in the Kitchen class at my day camp, where I’d learned to cook a few simple meals: hamburgers, grilled cheese (which I’d sometimes made for my mother on nights she worked late), and what Boris called “egg and toasts.” Boris, who sat on the countertop kicking the cabinets with his heels and talking to me while I cooked, did the washing-up. In the Ukraine, he told me, he’d sometimes picked pockets for money to eat. “Got chased, once or twice,” he said. “Never caught, though.”

“Maybe we should go down to the Strip sometime,” I said. We were standing at the kitchen counter at my house with knives and forks, eating our steaks straight from the frying pan. “If we were going to do it, that’d be the place. I never saw so many drunk people and they’re all from out of town.”

He stopped chewing; he looked shocked. “And why should we? When so easy to steal here, from so big stores!”

“Just saying.” My money from the doormen—which Boris and I spent a few dollars at a time, in vending machines and at the 7-Eleven near school that Boris called “the magazine”—would hold out a while, but not forever.

“Ha! And what will I do if you are arrested, Potter?” he said, dropping a fat piece of steak down to the dog, whom he had taught to dance on his hind legs. “Who will cook the dinner? And who will look after Snaps here?” Xandra’s dog Popper he’d taken to calling ‘Amyl’ and ‘Nitrate’ and ‘Popchik’ and ‘Snaps’—anything but his real name. I’d started bringing him in even though I wasn’t supposed to because I was so tired of him always straining at the end of his chain trying to look in at the glass door and yapping his head off. But inside he was surprisingly quiet; starved for attention, he stuck close to us wherever we went, trotting anxiously at our heels, upstairs and down, curling up to sleep on the rug while Boris and I read and quarrelled and listened to music up in my room.

“Seriously, Boris,” I said, pushing the hair from my eyes (I was badly in need of a haircut, but didn’t want to spend the money), “I don’t see much difference in stealing wallets and stealing steaks.”

“Big difference, Potter.” He held his hands apart to show me just how big. “Stealing from working person? And stealing from big rich company that robs the people?”

“Costco doesn’t rob the people. It’s a discount supermarket.”

“Fine then. Steal essentials of life from private citizen. This is your so-smart plan. Hush,” he said to the dog, who’d barked sharply for more steak.

“I wouldn’t steal from some poor working person,” I said, tossing Popper a piece of steak myself. “There are plenty of sleazy people walking around Vegas with wads of cash.”

“Sleazy?”

“Dodgy. Dishonest.”

“Ah.” The pointed dark eyebrow went up. “Fair enough. But if you steal money from sleazy person, like gangster, they are likely to hurt you, nie?”

“You weren’t scared of getting hurt in Ukraine?”

He shrugged. “Beaten up, maybe. Not shot.”

“Shot?”

“Yes, shot. Don’t look surprised. This cowboy country, who knows? Everyone has guns.”

“I’m not saying a cop. I’m saying drunk tourists. The place is crawling with them Saturday night.”

“Ha!” He put the pan down on the floor for the dog to finish off. “Likely you will end up in jail, Potter. Loose morals, slave to the economy. Very bad citizen, you.”

xiii.

BY THIS TIME—OCTOBER or so—we were eating together almost every night. Boris, who’d often had three or four beers before dinner, switched over at mealtimes to hot tea. Then, after a post-dinner shot of vodka, a habit I soon picked up from him (“It helps you digest the food,” Boris explained), we lolled around reading, doing homework, and sometimes arguing, and often drank ourselves to sleep in front of the television.

“Don’t go!” said Boris, one night at his house when I stood up toward the end of The Magnificent Seven—the final gunfight, Yul Brynner rounding up his men. “You’ll miss the best part.”

“Yeah, but it’s almost eleven.”

Boris—lying on the floor—raised himself on an elbow. Long-haired, narrow-chested, weedy and thin, he was Yul Brynner’s exact opposite in most respects and yet there was also an odd familial resemblance: they had the same sly, watchful quality, amused and a bit cruel, something Mongol or Tatar in the slant of the eyes.

“Call Xandra to come collect you,” he said with a yawn. “What time does she get off work?”

“Xandra? Forget it.”

Again Boris yawned, eyes heavy-lidded with vodka. “Sleep here, then,” he said, rolling over and scrubbing his face with one hand. “Will they miss you?”

Were they even coming home? Some nights they didn’t. “Doubtful,” I said.

“Hush,” said Boris—reaching for his cigarettes, sitting up. “Watch now. Here come the bad guys.”

“You saw this movie before?”

“Dubbed into Russian, if you can believe it. But very weak Russian. Sissy. Is sissy the word I want? More like schoolteachers than gunfighters, is what I’m trying to say.”

xiv.

THOUGH I’D BEEN MISERABLE with grief at the Barbours’, I now thought longingly of the apartment on Park Avenue as a lost Eden. And though I had access to email on the computer at school, Andy wasn’t much of a writer, and the messages I got in reply were frustratingly impersonal. (Hi, Theo. Hope you enjoyed your summer. Daddy got a new boat [the Absalom]. Mother will not set foot upon it but unfortunately I was compelled. Japanese II is giving me some headaches but everything else is fine.) Mrs. Barbour dutifully answered the paper letters I sent—a line or two on her monogrammed correspondence cards from Dempsey and Carroll—but there was never anything personal. She always asked how are you? and closed with thinking about you, but there was never any we miss you or we wish we could see you.

I wrote to Pippa, in Texas, though she was too ill to answer—which was just as well, since most of the letters I never sent.

Dear Pippa,

How are you? How do you like Texas? I’ve thought about you a lot. Have you been riding that horse you like? Things are great here. I wonder if it’s hot there, since it’s so hot here.

That was boring; I threw it away, and started again.

Dear Pippa,

How are you? I’ve been thinking about you and hoping you are okay. I hope that things are

going okay

wonderful for you in Texas. I have to say, I sort of hate it here, but I’ve made some friends and am getting used to it a bit, I guess.

I wonder if you get homesick? I do. I miss New York a lot. I wish we lived closer together. How is your head now? Better, I hope. I’m sorry that

“Is that your girlfriend?” said Boris—crunching an apple, reading over my shoulder.

“Shove off.”

“What happened to her?” he said and then, when I didn’t reply: “Did you hit her?”

“What?” I said, only half listening.

“Her head? That’s why you’re apologizing? You hit her or something?”

“Yeah, right,” I said—and then, from his earnest, intent expression, realized he was perfectly serious.

“You think I beat girls up?” I said.

He shrugged. “She might have deserved it.”

“Um, we don’t hit women in America.”

He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. “No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.”

“Boris, shut up and leave me alone.”

But he had rattled me with his comment and rather than start a new letter to Pippa, I began one to Hobie.

Dear Mr. Hobart,

Hello, how are you? Well, I hope. I have never written to thank you for your kindness during my last weeks in New York. I hope that you and Cosmo are okay, though I know you both miss Pippa. How is she? I hope she’s been able to go back to her music. I hope too

But I didn’t send that one either. Hence I was delighted when a letter arrived—a long letter, on real paper—from none other than Hobie.

“What’ve you got there?” said my father suspiciously—spotting the New York postmark, snatching the letter from my hand.

“What?”

But my dad had already torn the envelope open. He scanned it, quickly, and then lost interest. “Here,” he said, handing it back to me. “Sorry, kiddo. My mistake.”

The letter itself was beautiful, as a physical artifact: rich paper, careful penmanship, a whisper of quiet rooms and money.

Dear Theo,

I’ve wanted to hear how you are and yet I’m glad I haven’t, as I hope this means you are happy and busy. Here, the leaves have turned, Washington Square is sodden and yellow, and it’s getting cold. On Saturday mornings, Cosmo and I mooch around the Village—I pick him up and carry him into the cheese shop—not sure that’s entirely legal but the girls behind the counter save him bits and bobs of cheese. He misses Pippa as much as I do but—like me—still enjoys his meals. Sometimes we eat by the fireplace now that Jack Frost is on us.

I hope that you’re settling in there a bit and have made some friends. When I talk to Pippa on the telephone she doesn’t seem very happy where she is, though her health is certainly better. I am going to fly down there for Thanksgiving. I don’t know how pleased Margaret will be to have me, but Pippa wants me so I’ll go. If they allow me to carry Cosmo on the plane I might bring him, too.

I’m enclosing a photo that I thought you might enjoy—of a Chippendale bureau that has just arrived, very bad repair, I was told it was stored in an unheated shed up around Watervliet, New York. Very scarred, very nicked, and the top’s in two pieces—but—look at those swept-back, weight-bearing talons on that ball-and-claw! the feet don’t come out well in the photo, but you can really see the pressure of the claws digging in. It’s a masterpiece, and I only wish it had been better looked after. I don’t know if you can see the remarkable graining on the top—extraordinary.

As for the shop: I open it a few times a week by appointment, but mostly I keep myself busy below stairs with things sent to me by private clients. Mrs. Skolnik and several people in the neighborhood have asked about you—everything’s much the same here, except Mrs. Cho at the Korean market had a little stroke (

very

little, she’s back at work now). Also that coffee shop on Hudson that I liked so much has gone out of business—very sad. I walked by this morning and it looks as if they’re turning it into a—well, I don’t know what you’d call it. Some sort of Japanese novelty store.

I see that as usual I’ve gone on too long and that I’m running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and well, and it’s all a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there’s anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I will.

xv.

THAT NIGHT, AT BORIS’S—lying drunk on my half of the batik-draped mattress—I tried to remember what Pippa had looked like. But the moon was so large and clear through the uncurtained window that it made me think instead of a story my mother had told me, about driving to horse shows with her mother and father in the back seat of their old Buick when she was little. “It was a lot of travelling—ten hours sometimes through hard country. Ferris wheels, rodeo rings with sawdust, everything smelled like popcorn and horse manure. One night we were in San Antonio, and I was having a bit of a melt-down—wanting my own room, you know, my dog, my own bed—and Daddy lifted me up on the fairgrounds and told me to look at the moon. ‘When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.’ So after he died, and I had to go to Aunt Bess—I mean, even now, in the city, when I see a full moon, it’s like he’s telling me not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.” She kissed me on the nose. “Or where you are, puppy. The center of my earth is you.”

A rustle, next to me. “Potter?” said Boris. “You awake?”

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “What does the moon look like in Indonesia?”

“What are you on about?”

“Or, I don’t know, Russia? Is it just the same as here?”

He rapped me lightly on the side of the head with his knuckles—a gesture of his that I had come to know, meaning idiot. “Same everywhere,” he said, yawning, propping himself up on his scrawny braceleted wrist. “And why?”

“Dunno,” I said, and then, after a tense pause: “Do you hear that?”

A door had slammed. “What’s that?” I said, rolling to face him. We looked at each other, listening. Voices downstairs—laughter, people knocking around, a crash like something had been knocked over.

“Is that your dad?” I said, sitting up—and then I heard a woman’s voice, drunken and shrill.

Boris sat up too, bony and sickly-pale in the light through the window. Downstairs, it sounded like they were throwing things and pushing furniture around.

“What are they saying?” I whispered.

Boris listened. I could see all the bolts and hollows in his neck. “Bullshit,” he said. “They’re drunk.”

The two of us sat there, listening—Boris more intently than me.

“Who’s that with him then?” I said.

“Some whore.” He listened for a moment, brow furrowed, his profile sharp in the moonlight, and then lay back down. “Two of them.”

I rolled over, and checked my iPod. It was 3:17 in the morning.

“Fuck,” groaned Boris, scratching his stomach. “Why don’t they shut up?”

“I’m thirsty,” I said, after a timid pause.

He snorted. “Ha! You don’t want to go out there now, trust me.”

“What are they doing?” I asked. One of the women had just screamed—whether in laughter or fright, I couldn’t tell.

We lay there, stiff as boards, staring at the ceiling, listening to the ominous crashing and bumping-around.

“Ukrainian?” I said, after a bit. Though I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, I’d been around Boris enough that I was beginning to differentiate the intonations of spoken Ukrainian from Russian.

“Top marks, Potter.” Then: “Light me a cigarette.”

We passed it back and forth, in the dark, until another door slammed somewhere and the voices died down. At last, Boris exhaled, a final smoky sigh, and rolled over to stub it out in the overflowing ashtray beside the bed. “Good night,” he whispered.

“Good night.”

He fell asleep almost immediately—I could tell from his breathing—but I lay awake a lot longer, with a scratchy throat, feeling light-headed and sick from the cigarette. How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me? Boris—oblivious—snored beside me. At last, towards dawn, when I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of my mother: sitting across from me on the 6 train, swaying slightly, her face calm in the flickering artificial lights.

What are you doing here? she said. Go home! Right now! I’ll meet you at the apartment. Only the voice wasn’t quite right; and when I looked more closely I saw it wasn’t her at all, only someone pretending to be her. And with a gasp and a start, I woke up.

xvi.

BORIS’S FATHER WAS A mysterious figure. As Boris explained it: he was often on site in the middle of nowhere, at his mine, where he stayed with his crew for weeks at a time. “Doesn’t wash,” said Boris austerely. “Stays filthy drunk.” The beaten-up short wave radio in the kitchen belonged to him (“From Brezhnev era,” said Boris; “he won’t throw it away”), and so were the Russian-language newspapers and USA Todays I sometimes found around. One day I’d walked into one of the bathrooms at Boris’s house (which were fairly grim—no shower curtain or toilet seat, upstairs or down, and black stuff growing in the tub) and got a bad start from one of his dad’s suits, soaking wet and smelly, dangling like a dead thing from the shower rod: scratchy, misshapen, of lumpy brown wool the color of dug roots, it dripped horribly on the floor like some moist-breathing golem from the old country or maybe a garment dredged up in a police net.

“What?” said Boris, when I emerged.

“Your dad washes his own suits?” I said. “In the sink in there?”

Boris—leaning against the frame of the door, gnawing the side of his thumb nail—shrugged evasively.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, and then, when he kept on looking at me: “What? They don’t have dry cleaning in Russia?”

“He has plenty of jewelry and posh,” growled Boris around the side of his thumb. “Rolex watch, Ferragamo shoes. He can clean his suit however he wants.”

“Right,” I said, and changed the subject. Several weeks passed with no thought of Boris’s dad at all. But then came the day when Boris slid in late to Honors English with a wine colored bruise under his eye.

“Ah, got it in the face with a football,” he said in a cheery voice when Mrs. Spear (‘Spirsetskaya,’ as he called her) asked him, suspiciously, what had happened.

This, I knew, was a lie. Glancing over at him, across the aisle, I wondered throughout our listless class discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson how he’d managed to black his eye after I’d left him the previous night to go home and walk Popper—Xandra left him tied up outside so much that I was starting to feel responsible for him.

“What’d you do?” I said when I caught up with him after class.

“Eh?”

“How’d you get that?”

He winked. “Oh, come on,” he said, bumping his shoulder against mine.

“What? Were you drunk?”

“My dad came home,” he said, and then, when I didn’t answer: “What else, Potter? What did you think?”

“Jesus, why?”

He shrugged. “Glad you’d gone,” he said, rubbing his good eye. “Couldn’t believe when he showed up. Was sleeping on the couch downstairs. At first I thought it was you.”

“What happened?”

“Ah,” said Boris, sighing extravagantly; he’d been smoking on the way to school, I could smell it on his breath. “He saw the beer bottles on the floor.”

“He hit you because you were drinking?”

“Because he was fucking plastered, is why. He was drunk as a log—I don’t think he knew it was me he was hitting. This morning—he saw my face, he cried and was sorry. Anyway, he won’t be back for a while.”

“Why not?”

“He’s got a lot going on out there, he said. Won’t be back for three weeks. The mine is close to one of those places where they have the state-run brothels, you know?”

“They aren’t state-run,” I said—and then found myself wondering if they were.

“Well, you know what I mean. One good thing though—he left me moneys.”

“How much?”

“Four thousand.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, no—” he slapped his forehead—“thinking in roubles, sorry! About two hundred dollars, but still. Should have asked for more but I didn’t have the nerve.”

We’d reached the juncture of the hallway where I had to turn for algebra and Boris had to turn for American Government: the bane of his existence. It was a required course—easy even by the desultory standards of our school—but trying to get Boris to understand about the Bill of Rights, and the enumerated versus implied powers of the U.S. Congress, reminded me of the time I’d tried to explain to Mrs. Barbour what an Internet server was.

“Well, see you after class,” said Boris. “Explain again, before I go, what’s the difference between Federal Bank and Federal Reserve?”

“Did you tell anybody?”

“Tell what?”

“You know.”

“What, you want to report me?” said Boris, laughing.

“Not you. Him.”

“And why? Why is that a good idea? Tell me. So I can get deported?”

“Right,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause.

“So—we should eat out tonight!” said Boris. “In a restaurant! Maybe the Mexican.” Boris, after initial suspicion and complaint, had grown to like Mexican food—unknown in Russia, he said, not bad when you got used to it, though if it was too spicy he wouldn’t touch it. “We can take the bus.”

“The Chinese is closer. And the food is better.”

“Yah, but—remember?”

“Oh, yeah, right,” I said. The last time we’d eaten there we’d slipped out without paying. “Forget that.”

xvii.

BORIS LIKED XANDRA A lot better than I did: leaping forward to open doors for her, saying he liked her new haircut, offering to carry things. I’d teased him about her ever since I’d caught him looking down her top when she leaned to reach her cell phone on the kitchen counter.

“God, she’s hot,” said Boris, once we were up in my room. “Think your dad would mind?”

“Probably wouldn’t notice.”

“No, serious, what do you think your dad would do to me?”

“If what?”

“If me and Xandra.”

“I dunno, probably call the police.”

He snorted, derisively. “What for?”

“Not you. Her. Statutory rape.”

“I wish.”

“Go on and fuck her if you want,” I said. “I don’t care if she goes to jail.”

Boris rolled over on his stomach and looked at me slyly. “She takes cocaine, do you know that?”

“What?”

“Cocaine.” He mimed sniffing.

“You’re kidding,” I said, and then, when he smirked at me: “How can you tell?”

“I just know. From the way she talks. Also she’s grinding her teeth. Watch her sometime.”

I didn’t know what to watch for. But then one afternoon we came in when my dad wasn’t home and saw her straightening up from the coffee table with a sniff, holding her hair behind her neck with one hand. When she threw her head back, and her eyes landed on us, there was a moment where nobody said anything and then she turned away as if we weren’t there.

We kept walking, up the stairs to my room. Though I’d never seen anybody snorting drugs before, it was clear even to me what she was doing.

“God, sexy,” said Boris, after I shut the door. “Wonder where she keeps it?”

“Dunno,” I said, flopping down on my bed. Xandra was just leaving; I could hear her car in the driveway.

“Think she’ll give us some?”

“She might give you some.”

Boris sank down to sit on the floor by the bed, with his knee up and his back against the wall. “Do you think she’s selling it?”

“No way,” I said, after a slight, disbelieving pause. “You think?”

“Ha! Good for you, if she is.”

“How’s that?”

“Cash around the house!”

“Fat lot of good that does me.”

He swung his shrewd, appraising gaze over to me. “Who pays the bills here, Potter?” he said.

“Huh.” It was the first time that this question, which I immediately recognized as of great practical importance, had even occurred to me. “I don’t know. My dad, I think. Though Xandra puts in some too.”

“And where does he get it? His moneys?”

“No clue,” I said. “He talks to people on the telephone and then he leaves the house.”

“Any checkbooks lying around? Any cash?”

“No. Never. Chips, sometimes.”

“As good as cash,” Boris said swiftly, spitting a bitten-off thumbnail on the floor.

“Right. Except you can’t cash them in the casino if you’re under eighteen.”

Boris chortled. “Come on. We figure out something, if we have to. We dress you up in that poncy school jacket with the coat of arms, send you to the window, ‘Excuse me, miss—’ ”

I rolled over and punched him hard, in the arm. “Fuck you,” I said, stung by his drawling, snobbish rendering of my voice.

“Can’t be talking like that, Potter,” said Boris gleefully, rubbing his arm. “They won’t give you a fucking cent. All I’m saying is, I know where my dad’s checkbook is, and if there’s an emergency—” he held out his open palms—“right?”

“Right.”

“I mean, if I have to write bad check, I write bad check,” said Boris philosophically. “Good to know I can. I’m not saying, break in their room and go through their things, but still, good idea to keep your eye open, yes?”

xviii.

BORIS AND HIS FATHER didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, and Xandra and my dad had reservations for a Romantic Holiday Extravaganza at a French restaurant in the MGM Grand. “Do you want to come?” said my father when he saw me looking at the brochure on the kitchen counter: hearts and fireworks, tricolor bunting over a plate of roast turkey. “Or do you have something of your own to do?”

“No thanks.” He was being nice, but the thought of being with Dad and Xandra on their Romantic Holiday Whatever made me uneasy. “I’ve got plans.”

“What are you doing then?”

“I’m having Thanksgiving with somebody else.”

“Who with?” said my dad, in a rare burst of parental solicitude. “A friend?”

“Let me guess,” said Xandra—barefoot, in the Miami Dolphins jersey she slept in, staring into the fridge. “The same person who keeps eating these oranges and apples I bring home.”

“Oh, come on,” said my dad sleepily, coming up behind her and putting his arms around her, “you like the little Russki—what’s his name—Boris.”

“Sure I like him. Which is good, I guess, since he’s here pretty much all the time. Shit,” she said—twisting away from him, slapping her bare thigh—“who let this mosquito inside? Theo, I don’t know why you can’t remember to keep that door to the pool shut. I’ve told you and told you.”

“Well, you know, I could always have Thanksgiving with you guys, if you’d rather,” I said blandly, leaning back against the kitchen counter. “Why don’t I.”

I had intended this to annoy Xandra, and with pleasure I saw that it did. “But the reservation’s for two,” said Xandra, flicking her hair back and looking at my dad.

“Well, I’m sure they can work something out.”

“We’ll need to call ahead.”

“Fine then, call,” said my dad, giving her a slightly stoned pat on the back and ambling on in to the living room to check on his football scores.

Xandra and I stood looking at each other for a moment, and then she looked away, as if into some bleak and untenable vision of the future. “I need coffee,” she said listlessly.

“It wasn’t me who left that door open.”

“I don’t know who keeps doing it. All I know is, those weird Amway-selling people over there didn’t drain their fountain before they moved and now there’s a jillion mosquitoes everywhere I look—I mean, there goes another one, shit.”

“Look, don’t be mad. I don’t have to come with you guys.”

She put down the box of coffee filters. “So, what are you saying?” she said. “Should I change the reservation or not?”

“What are you two going on about?” called my father faintly from the next room, from his nest of beringed coasters, old cigarette packs, and marked-up baccarat sheets.

“Nothing,” called Xandra. Then, a few minutes later, as the coffee maker began to hiss and pop, she rubbed her eye and said in a sleep-roughened voice: “I never said I didn’t want you to come.”

“I know. I never said you did.” Then: “Also, just so you know, it’s not me that leaves the door open. It’s Dad, when he goes out there to talk on the phone.”

Xandra—reaching in the cabinet for her Planet Hollywood coffee mug—looked back at me over her shoulder. “You’re not really having dinner at his house?” she said. “The little Russki or whatever?”

“Nah. We’ll just be here watching television.”

“Do you want me to bring you something?”

“Boris likes those cocktail sausages you bring home. And I like the wings. The hot ones.”

“Anything else? What about those mini taquito things? You like those too, don’t you?”

“That would be great.”

“Fine. I’ll hook you guys up. Just stay out of my cigarettes, that’s all I ask. I don’t care if you smoke,” she said, raising a hand to hush me, “it’s not like I’m busting you, but somebody’s been stealing packs out of the carton in here and it’s costing me like twenty-five bucks a week.”

xix.

EVER SINCE BORIS HAD shown up with the bruised eye, I had built Boris’s father up in my mind to be some thick-necked Soviet with pig eyes and a buzz haircut. In fact—as I was surprised to see, when I did finally meet him—he was as thin and pale as a starved poet. Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea. But when you looked him in the eye you realized that his frailty was deceptive. He was wiry, intense, bad temper shimmering off him—small-boned and sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox.

Though I’d glimpsed him in passing, and heard him (or a person I presumed was him) bumping around Boris’s house at night, I didn’t actually meet him face-to-face until a few days before Thanksgiving. Then we walked into Boris’s house one day after school, laughing and talking, to find him hunched at the kitchen table with a bottle and a glass. Despite his shabby clothes, he was wearing expensive shoes and lots of gold jewelry; and when he looked up at us with reddened eyes we shut up talking immediately. Though he was a small, slightly built man, there was something in his face that made you not want to get too close to him.

“Hi,” I said tentatively.

“Hello,” he said—stony-faced, in a much thicker accent than Boris—and then turned to Boris and said something in Ukrainian. A brief conversation followed, which I observed with interest. It was interesting to see the change that came over Boris when he was speaking another language—a sort of livening, or alertness, a sense of a different and more efficient person occupying his body.

Then—unexpectedly—Mr. Pavlikovsky held out both hands to me. “Thank you,” he said thickly.

Though I was afraid to approach him—it felt like approaching a wild animal—I stepped forward anyway and held out both my hands, awkwardly. He took them in his own, which were hard-skinned and cold.

“You are good person,” he said. His gaze was bloodshot and way too intense. I wanted to look away, and was ashamed of myself.

“God be with you and bless you always,” he said. “You are like a son to me. For letting my son come into your family.”

My family? In confusion, I glanced over at Boris.

Mr. Pavlikovsky’s eyes went to him. “You told him what I said?”

“He said you are part of our family here,” said Boris, in a bored voice, “and if there is anything ever he can do for you…”

To my great surprise, Mr. Pavlikovsky pulled me close and caught me in a solid embrace, while I closed my eyes and tried hard to ignore his smell: hair cream, body odor, alcohol, and some sort of sharp, disagreeably pungent cologne.

“What was that about?” I said quietly when we were up in Boris’s room with the door shut.

Boris rolled his eyes. “Believe me. You don’t want to know.”

“Is he that loaded all the time? How does he keep his job?”

Boris cackled. “High official in the company,” he said. “Or something.”

We stayed up in Boris’s murky, batik-draped room until we heard his dad’s truck start up in the driveway. “He won’t be back for a while,” Boris said, as I let the curtain fall back over the window. “He feels bad for leaving me so much alone. He knows is a holiday coming up, and he asked if I could stay at your house.”

“Well, you do all the time anyway.”

“He knows that,” said Boris, scraping the hair out of his eyes. “That’s why he thanked you. But—I hope you don’t mind—I gave him your wrong address.”

“Why?”

“Because—” he moved his legs to make room for me to sit by him, without my having to ask—“I think maybe you don’t want him rolling up drunk at your house in the middle of the night. Waking your father and Xandra up out of bed. Also—if he ever asks—he thinks your last name is Potter.”

“Why?”

“Is better this way,” said Boris calmly. “Trust me.”

xx.

BORIS AND I LAY on the floor in front of the television at my house, eating potato chips and drinking vodka, watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It was snowing in New York. A number of balloons had just passed—Snoopy, Ronald McDonald, SpongeBob, Mr. Peanut—and a troupe of Hawaiian dancers in loincloths and grass skirts was performing a number in Herald Square.

“Glad that’s not me,” said Boris. “Bet they’re freezing their arses off.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I had no eyes for the balloons or the dancers or any of it. To see Herald Square on television made me feel as if I were stranded millions of light-years from Earth and picking up signals from the early days of radio, announcer voices and audience applause from a vanished civilization.

“Idiots. Can’t believe they dress like that. They’ll end up in hospital, those girls.” As fiercely as Boris complained about the heat in Las Vegas, he also had an unshakable belief that anything “cold” made people ill: unheated swimming pools, the air-conditioning at my house, and even ice in drinks.

He rolled over on his back and passed me the bottle. “You and your mother, you went to this parade?”

“Nah.”

“Why not?” said Boris, feeding Popper a potato chip.

“Nekulturny,” I said, a word I’d picked up from him. “And too many tourists.”

He lit a cigarette, and offered me one. “Are you sad?”

“A little,” I said, leaning in to light it from his match. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Thanksgiving before; it kept playing and re-playing like a movie I couldn’t stop: my mother padding around barefoot in old jeans with the knees sprung out, opening a bottle of wine, pouring me some ginger ale in a champagne glass, setting out some olives, turning up the stereo, putting on her holiday joke apron, and unwrapping the turkey breast she’d bought us in Chinatown, only to wrinkle her nose and start back at the smell—“Oh God, Theo, this thing’s gone off, open the door for me”—eyewatering ammonia reek, holding it out before her like an undetonated grenade as she ran with it down the fire stairs and out to the garbage can on the street while I—leaning out from the window—made gleeful retching noises from on high. We’d eaten an austere meal of canned green beans, canned cranberries, and brown rice with toasted almonds: “Our Vegetarian Socialist Thanksgiving,” she’d called it. We’d planned carelessly because she had a project due at work; next year, she promised (both of us tired from laughing; the spoiled turkey had for some reason put us in an hilarious mood), we were renting a car and driving to her friend Jed’s in Vermont, or else making reservations someplace great like Gramercy Tavern. Only that future had not happened; and I was celebrating my alcoholic potato-chip Thanksgiving with Boris in front of the television.

“What are we going to eat, Potter?” said Boris, scratching his stomach.

“What? Are you hungry?”

He waggled his hand sideways: comme ci, comme ça. “You?”

“Not especially.” The roof of my mouth was scraped raw from eating so many chips, and the cigarettes had begun to make me feel ill.

Suddenly Boris howled with laughter; he sat up. “Listen,” he said—kicking me, pointing to the television. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“The news man. He just wished happy holiday to his kids. ‘Bastard and Casey.’ ”

“Oh, come on.” Boris was always mis-hearing English words like this, aural malaprops, sometimes amusing but often just irritating.

“ ‘Bastard and Casey!’ That’s hard, eh? Casey, all right, but call his own kid ‘Bastard’ on holiday television?”

“That’s not what he said.”

“Fine, then, you know everything, what did he say?”

“How should I know what the fuck?”

“Then why do you argue with me? Why do you think you always know better? What is the problem with this country? How did so stupid nation get to be so arrogant and rich? Americans… movie stars… TV people… they name their kids like Apple and Blanket and Blue and Bastard and all kind of crazy things.”

“And your point is—?”

“My point is like, democracy is excuse for any fucking thing. Violence… greed… stupidity… anything is ok if Americans do it. Right? Am I right?”

“You really can’t shut up, can you?”

“I know what I heard, ha! Bastard! Tell you what. If I thought my kid was a bastard I would sure the fuck name him something else.”

In the fridge, there were wings and taquitos and cocktail sausages that Xandra had brought home, as well as dumplings from the strip-mall Chinese where my father liked to eat, but by the time we actually got around to eating, the bottle of vodka (Boris’s contribution to Thanksgiving) was already half gone and we were well on our way to being sick. Boris—who sometimes had a serious streak when he was drunk, a Russianate bent for heavy topics and unanswerable questions—was sitting on the marble countertop waving around a fork with a cocktail sausage speared on it and talking a bit wildly about poverty and capitalism and climate change and how fucked up the world was.

At some disoriented point, I said: “Boris, shut up. I don’t want to hear this.” He’d gone back to my room for my school copy of Walden and was reading aloud a lengthy passage that bolstered some point he was trying to make.

The thrown book—luckily a paperback—clipped me in the cheekbone. “Ischézni! Get out!”

“This is my house, you ignorant fuck.”

The cocktail sausage—still impaled on the fork—sailed past my head, missing me narrowly. But we were laughing. By mid-afternoon we were completely wrecked: rolling around on the carpet, tripping each other, laughing and swearing, crawling on hands and knees. A football game was on, and though it was an annoyance to both of us it was too much trouble to find the remote and change the channel. Boris was so hammered he kept trying to talk to me in Russian.

“Speak English or shut up,” I said, trying to catch myself on the banister, and ducking his swing so clumsily I crashed and fell into the coffee table.

“Ty menjá dostál!! Poshël ty!”

“Gobble gobble gobble,” I replied in a whiny girl voice, face down in the carpet. The floor was rocking and bucking like the deck of a ship. “Balalaika pattycake.”

“Fucking télik,” said Boris, collapsing on the floor beside me, kicking out ridiculously at the television. “Don’t want to watch this shite.”

“Well I mean, fuck”—rolling over, clutching my stomach—“I don’t either.” My eyes weren’t tracking right, objects had halos that shimmered out beyond their normal boundaries.

“Let’s watch weathers,” said Boris, wading on his knees across the living room. “Want to see the weathers in New Guinea.”

“You’ll have to find it, I don’t know what channel.”

“Dubai!” exclaimed Boris, collapsing forward on all fours—and then, a mushy flow of Russian in which I caught a swear word or two.

“Angliyski! Speak English.”

“Is snowing there?” Shaking my shoulder. “Man says is snowing, crazy man, ty videsh?! Snowing in Dubai! A miracle, Potter! Look!”

“That’s Dublin you ass. Not Dubai.”

“Valí otsyúda! Fuck off!”

Then I must have blacked out (an all-too-typical occurrence when Boris brought a bottle over) because the next I knew, the light was completely different and I was kneeling by the sliding doors with a puddle of puke on the carpet beside me and my forehead pressed to the glass. Boris was fast asleep, face down and snoring happily, one arm dangling off the sofa. Popchik was sleeping too, chin resting contentedly on the back of Boris’s head. I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame.

I might have cried, if Boris wasn’t there. Instead, I went in the bathroom and vomited again and then after drinking some water from the tap came back with paper towels and cleaned up the mess I’d made even though my head hurt so much I could barely see. The vomit was an awful orange color from the barbecue chicken wings and hard to get up, it had left a stain, and while I scrubbed at it with dish detergent I tried hard to fasten on comforting thoughts of New York—the Barbours’ apartment with its Chinese porcelains and its friendly doormen, and also the timeless backwater of Hobie’s house, old books and loudly-ticking clocks, old furniture, velvet curtains, everywhere the sediment of the past, quiet rooms where things were calm and made sense. Often at night, when I was overwhelmed with the strangeness of where I was, I lulled myself to sleep by thinking of his workshop, rich smells of beeswax and rosewood shavings, and then the narrow stairs up to the parlor, where dusty sunbeams shone on oriental carpets.