SHE WAS MY FATHER’S secretary and very lovely in ways I couldn’t quite describe—at nine years old, my mind didn’t yet include the idea of female beauty. School was on break, and maybe because my parents didn’t know what to do with me, she and I had been at her desk behind the reception window the last couple of days in an intense interaction that felt like the deepest intimacy.
“I’m going to show you something,” she said, reaching into her pocketbook and bringing out a rectangular jeweler’s box, then flipping open the lid: inside was a shiny military decoration with a big black swastika in the middle. She ran a finger over the swastika’s black enamel surface. “It’s real. My boyfriend gave it to me.”
I glanced up at her, confused. I had never considered the possibility that she had a boyfriend—that she had any life beyond the desk, our two chairs. The idea was as strange as the medal, the sinister elbows of the swastika.
“My boyfriend is a Hells Angel,” she explained. “The SS were the elite of the German army, the bravest of the brave, just like the Hells Angels.”
I listened in silence, worried that she knew we were Jewish, until at some point she put the medal back in her purse. Then I began telling her a story of my own, using a small rubber kangaroo I had brought with me. I’ve forgotten the details, but I remember feeling a little ashamed of myself because the story came off younger than I wanted to sound. And yet I couldn’t stop myself. I was in a rush, bent on regaining our connection, the feeling that there was nobody in the world but the two of us.
And then a man stepped through the front door. In my memory he is gigantic, his head almost grazing the ceiling. He stopped at the reception window and thrust his face through the opening: black eyes, black beard, long black hair. I froze with the rubber kangaroo in my hand, and she looked up at him with an expression both annoyed and embarrassed. “This is what we do all day,” she told him.
He glanced my way. “Hey, are you bothering my girlfriend?” he boomed. Then my father came out and greeted him and together they walked back to his office.
That was the final rupture. After that, instead of sitting with her, I roamed the office suite, listening in on my father’s conversations with his clients, or poking around the magazine rack in the waiting area. Finally, I drifted into the conference room, where I found a stack of Playboys in a cardboard box and sat on the carpet and leafed through them with a hovering, silent feeling. I had never seen pictures of naked women before.
I sensed a presence behind me and turned my head to see another one of the Angels standing in the doorway. Big Vinnie Girolama was so large that he completely filled the opening: no shirt, just a leather vest with the Hells Angels insignia on it, his big belly covered in tattoos. The expression on his face was oddly thoughtful, and he left in silence; I went back to turning pages.
Some time later, I watched my father walking with him down the hall to the reception area, seeing him off, and I heard Vinnie say, “I’m just telling you this, Stan, because I know if it were my son, I’d want somebody to tell me. That’s all.”
“Of course, of course,” said my father, who was in fact incredibly prim in this one area of life. “It’s okay, I like Playboy too.”