Virgins

• JANUARY—JUNE 1979 •

Rachel and I became lovers during the winter quarter of our senior year. We were enrolled in a seminar on Tolstoy and sat next to each other on the first day of class. Professor Krzyzowski announced that we were in the right city but the wrong season to read Tolstoy. “We ought to study Tolstoy in the spring and Dostoevsky in the winter,” he said ruefully. Chicago was the right city, of course, because of its Slavic spirit—the green-domed Catholic churches with ornate spires, the pierogies and pastries, all those Polish, Croatian, Ukrainian, and Russian names crowded with consonants, the broad blond faces one saw throughout the city.

During the first month of the term, we continued to sit next to each other, exchanging smiles and small talk before and after class. I knew that Rachel had been anointed as the top English major in the college. She had won every department award and was Professor Hall’s research assistant. The author of a famous book of literary theory, Edmund Hall was the most prestigious professor in the English Department. So I wasn’t surprised when I went to a department meeting for students interested in graduate school and saw Rachel sitting on a couch. She beamed radiantly at me; I went over and sat next to her.

The professor who ran the meeting tried to dissuade us from going to graduate school. The job market for PhD’s in English was at its lowest ebb in the history of the profession, he explained. He told us to expect to spend six or seven years completing our degrees without any guarantee of a decent job. He also strongly advised against applying to graduate school at Chicago. We ought to study with different professors; the department was looking for new blood; moreover, he reminded us, Chicago, unlike the other top graduate programs, didn’t hire teaching assistants or provide support for every PhD student. Despite everything I heard, I was still planning on applying to the graduate program at Chicago. I was also applying to the program in religion and literature at the Divinity School, where admission was not as competitive and financial aid was more generous. I loved the university, loved Hyde Park, loved Chicago; I couldn’t imagine a better life than cocooning myself in Regenstein Library and sitting around seminar tables in classrooms with dormered windows on the upper floors of Cobb Hall for another six or seven years.

When the meeting ended, I asked Rachel where she was applying. She told me Stanford and Berkeley.

“Not here?” I had heard rumors that Professor Hall had appealed to her to stay on, promising her a prestigious fellowship.

“No, I don’t like Chicago very much.”

“Why did you come here?”

“A scholarship I couldn’t turn down. How about you?”

“Where am I applying, or why did I come here?”

“Both.”

I told her I was applying to Harvard, Yale, and Chicago. Then I told her the story of how I had been an average-to-poor student in high school but won first prize in the Scholastic Magazine high school short story contest.

“That’s amazing,” she said. “You say really smart things in class. Why do you think you didn’t do well in high school?”

“I guess I didn’t take myself very seriously.”

“What do you think changed?” she asked. She had pulled her knees up under her chin and was facing me, one arm extended in my direction along the back of the couch.

“I put a thousand miles between my mother and me.”

Rachel laughed. “I had to put two thousand miles between me and my mother.”

“Yeah, but you were probably a star in high school too.”

“Well, I think it’s far more interesting to be a misunderstood creative type.”

“I bet your mother isn’t nearly as bad as mine,” I said.

“My mother punched out my stepmother at my bat mitzvah. Can you top that?”

“When I was twelve my mother married a man she had only known for two weeks. Their marriage lasted four months. He broke my nose and stole my mother’s car and jewelry.”

“Let’s call it a draw,” Rachel said, a smile lighting up her face.

Then she asked me if I still wrote stories.

“Not so much,” I said. “My sophomore year I took Kadish’s introductory course in creative writing. In the margin of my story he wrote, ‘This sentence is a disgrace to you, the university, and to the country.’” I laughed but Rachel looked appalled.

“What an ass!” she exclaimed.

“Oh, he’s not so bad. He’s had to labor under the shadow of Saul Bellow, and I think he feels that his life is a bad imitation of Bellow’s. His surliness is just part of his serious writer act.”

“I wouldn’t be so sympathetic to a professor who wrote something like that on one of my papers.”

“Well, I’m actually very close friends with his daughter, Wendy, so I know what he has to deal with. She’s a student here too.”

Actually, the main reason I was sympathetic to Kadish was because I had read his novels. I thought they were artful miniatures, but not the grand canvases created by Saul Bellow. Kadish, so brutally honest, had to know that he would never be as famous as Saul Bellow when he faced the blank page every morning.

“When I was in Kadish’s class, Wendy and I went out briefly. Now that was strange. To be sleeping with your professor’s daughter. Maybe I ought to enroll in his advanced creative writing class and write a story about that.”

“But you’re still close friends with her?” Rachel asked, as if that interested her more than my idea for a story, or the fact that I had slept with a professor’s daughter.

“Yes. Very close.”

“That’s so unusual.”

“Really?” I said. “To tell you the truth, it’s actually easier for me to be friends with girls than to be their boyfriend.” I immediately wanted to kick myself for saying that, for neutralizing myself.

“I’m the same way,” Rachel replied.

“It’s easier for you to be friends with girls than to be their girlfriend?”

I smiled but she didn’t smile back.

“No, with men.”

Everyone had left the room. Rachel and I were alone. I wanted to ask her out, but if she said no—if she said something about having a boyfriend or being too busy—I’d still have to sit next to her three times a week for the remainder of the term. She put her coat on, getting ready to go.

“I’d really like to read one of your stories sometime,” Rachel said.

“Where are you going now?” I asked.

“I think I’ll get some lunch. How about you?’

“The library. . . . Well, I guess I’ll see you in class,” I said.

“I really enjoyed our conversation,” she replied.

That night I tried phoning her in her dorm and was relieved when the person who answered the phone said she wasn’t in. The next afternoon I noticed Rachel sleeping in one of the comfortable reading chairs by the windows in Regenstein. I sat in the chair opposite her, opened my biography of Tolstoy, and waited for her to wake. After about twenty minutes she opened her eyes and looked at me happily, as if she had been hoping to see me when she awoke. I asked her if she wanted to go to the coffee shop in the basement of the library.

Over coffee, we found ourselves in an intense discussion about Sonya Tolstoy, the great writer’s muse, collaborator, and sacrificial wife. Rachel said that Sonya was a classic example of a woman who had subordinated her creativity to enable a male artist. I countered that Sonya certainly had a genius for life—managing the books, the estate, the hordes of children; transcribing her husband’s manuscripts; serving as a literary midwife for the great novels. Rachel replied that this showed that men’s and women’s creativity was differently gendered. Gendered? I didn’t know whether we were arguing or agreeing. Besides, did I really want to go out with someone who used the word gender as a verb?

“Look,” I said, “would you like to go out on Saturday?”

Rachel’s face relaxed, as if she were relieved that I had changed the subject. She said she would love to go out with me.

On Saturday night we went to Theresa’s, a blues bar in a blighted neighborhood only minutes from the grand houses of Hyde Park and Kenwood. The place was dim, hazy, and crowded. I counted only four other white people—probably also students from the university—but everyone was solicitous and friendly. The barmaid who brought our drinks offered us chili dogs, free of charge, and the musicians, most of them elderly black men, asked us every now and then how we were enjoying the music. Rachel had suggested coming to Theresa’s, and I was glad for it. We didn’t have to discuss literature or our mothers. We drank beer, slow danced, and held hands as we listened to the music.

Back in her room, Rachel and I kissed on her bed for about ten minutes. Then I began to unbutton her shirt. She smiled shyly at me and unbuttoned mine too. We kissed and fondled in the nude, but I felt as if I were sipping a soda without any fizz. Then Rachel yanked my penis like a cow’s udder.

“Not so hard,” I said, placing my hand on hers.

She gave me a plaintive look. “I’ve never done this before,” she said.

I was surprised, shocked, really. She was attractive and sociable, a daughter of liberal parents, a child of Berkeley, circa 1969.

“Any reason why?” I asked.

“I never met anyone I liked enough.” I stared into her eyes and she looked away; we both knew her answer didn’t explain why she was in bed with me on our first date. I surmised that she didn’t want to be a virgin when she graduated, before she returned to Berkeley, and had decided that I was her last, best chance.

“I suppose I’m honored,” I said. She looked up at me, placed a hand against the side of my face.

“I felt I could trust you,” she explained.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You think it’s really strange that I’m still a virgin,” she said.

“No, not really,” I lied.

“I do,” she replied.

“Why?”

“Because how can I pretend to know anything about literature or life if I’ve never been in love or had sex? I feel like a fraud discussing and writing about Anna Karenina when I’ve never experienced any of those feelings.”

“Experience is overrated,” I said. “I’d rather discuss Anna Karenina with you than with anyone.”

“Even Professor Krzyzowski?”

“I’d rather discuss Anna Karenina with you in the nude than with anyone,” I said.

Rachel laughed and kissed me on the mouth. She went under the covers and put her mouth on me. I was completely flaccid, and Rachel wasn’t moving her head, just keeping her lips suctioned over the head of my penis. I tapped her on the shoulder.

“It’s all right,” I said. “We can just go to sleep tonight.”

“Was I doing that the wrong way?” she asked.

I didn’t have the heart to tell the truth. “No, that felt nice. I just think I’ve had a little too much to drink.”

She cuddled up next to me. “Next time you can show me what to do.”

“I’m happy we could get nude and talk,” I said.

“Me too,” she said. “I like talking to you in the nude.”

Rachel bought some condoms the next day, but in bed that night I said we ought to wait a couple of weeks before having intercourse, wait until we were really comfortable with each other’s bodies; the experience would be nicer that way, I explained. Then I put my hand between her legs and parted the inner terrain very lightly, as if handling the petals of a rose. “I like to be touched this way too,” I said to her. Of course, I hadn’t known how to touch a woman until Jane had shown me, until she told me that I didn’t need to try to fit my whole hand into her vagina.

“Thank you for being so nice about this,” Rachel said.

I felt like a phony. The truth was that I had never had sex with a virgin and couldn’t bear to think about the blood and the pain. I had read The Bell Jar when I was a senior in high school and had literally become ill over the scene in which Sylvia Plath hemorrhaged after she lost her virginity. The morning after reading it, still thinking about that scene, I became so light-headed in the shower that I had to drop to one knee before I fainted completely and fell through the glass door.

Two weeks after we began sleeping together, Rachel and I still hadn’t had sex. Until I met her, I had just presumed that I could happily live out my life without ever having sex with a virgin. Reluctantly, I called Sarah at Rutgers.

“Hello, Sarah.”

“What’s two plus two?”

“Um . . . five?”

“Hi, Seth.”

This was the game Sarah and I always played when I called her: My voice sounded exactly like our father’s, and she always gave me a math quiz so she would know whether it was me or him on the other end.

I told her I had a new girlfriend.

“Nice,” she replied.

I could already sense the vibe between us was weird. Usually we phoned each other only to complain about our parents, almost never to discuss our love lives, especially since the night we had heard Abe Zelman fucking our mother.

“She’s still a virgin.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Is she fifteen or something?”

“No! She’s my age.”

“Is she ugly?”

“No, she’s very attractive.”

“Is she from Alabama or someplace like that?”

“No, Berkeley.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“I’ve never had sex with a virgin before.”

“Congratulations then.”

“I think I have some type of phobia about having sex with a virgin.”

“Why?” Her voice was a little more sympathetic.

“Did you read The Bell Jar in high school?”

“Seth, every girl my age read The Bell Jar in high school.”

“Well, that scene when Sylvia Plath hemorrhages after sex really traumatized me. I’m afraid of all the blood and pain.”

“Seth, you’re not the one who’s going to be bleeding or in pain.”

“Look, when you lost your virginity, how bad was it?”

“Not so bad. More uncomfortable than painful.”

“Did you bleed very much?”

“Not so much. Nothing like in The Bell Jar.”

I was silent for a moment.

“Feel better?” Sarah asked.

“Yes, somewhat. . . . Since we’re on the topic, I’ve always wondered whether you were really a virgin that time we spent the Fourth of July at the Zelmans’ summerhouse.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“So why did you tell Mom you were a virgin? I don’t think she would have been upset.”

“I don’t either. It was just the opposite. I knew she would have wanted to hear all about my sex life.”

“You don’t think I’m being like Mom now, do you?”

“No, Seth, you’re not like Mom.” She enunciated her reply with exaggerated slowness. These words were like a personal catechism between us, something we always needed to say to each other in order to be reminded that all was right with the world.

“So you never saw Aaron Zelman again?”

“No. I wrote him a letter and told him I didn’t feel right about seeing him since he was suing my father.”

“Do you think he believed you?”

“I don’t know. But what was I supposed to say? I don’t fuck men if their fathers are also fucking my mother?”

“Yes. I think it would have made him feel better to know the truth.”

“You’re being like Mom.”

“You’re so cruel.”

“You’re so strange.”

“I know. You’ve told me that about a zillion times.”

“No, I mean really, really strange. Every man I know would be foaming at the mouth over the chance to have sex with a beautiful, well-educated virgin, but you’re acting like a drama queen about it.”

“Are you saying I’m gay?”

“No, if you were gay, you wouldn’t be so strange.”

THREE WEEKS INTO OUR RELATIONSHIP, Rachel and I finally made love. I had never used a condom before—the other women I’d had sex with all used diaphragms or had been on the Pill—and I practiced putting one on without Rachel around so I would know what to do when the time came. I spent a long time going down on her, hoping that she would bear the pain of my penis more easily if she was really wet and close to an orgasm. She barely let out a sigh or groan when I finally did enter her. Actually, she never made much noise at all during sex, even when I brought her to orgasm with my tongue, which I had become quite skilled at during the three weeks I had been avoiding intercourse with her. Usually I knew she had climaxed when she shuddered slightly and then told me I could stop.

“Does it hurt? Are you all right?” I asked as I eased myself in.

“I’m fine,” she replied.

“Really?”

“Seth. Quiet.”

I came a minute later. When I pulled out I was afraid that my sheathed penis would be gleaming with bright red blood, but I only noticed white viscous matter; the condom had slipped about halfway up my penis.

“Oh, God, I hope I used the condom the right way,” I said.

“What’s the matter?” Rachel asked.

I turned on the bedside lamp and aimed it at my penis. I directed her attention to the unsheathed part.

“Do you think this whitish substance is from you or from me?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but she didn’t seem especially concerned.

“Maybe you better do a pregnancy test just to be safe.”

“Seth!”

“What?”

“Could you try being a little more romantic?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. I turned off the light, and she cuddled up next to me.

“Do you feel any different?” I asked.

“Not especially,” she said.

“Do you feel like you have a deeper, finer understanding of Anna Karenina?”

Years later, I had a girlfriend who told me I was the only man she’d ever slept with who became more talkative after sex.

“Seth, can we just go to sleep now?”

RACHEL WAS MY FRST SERIOUS GIRLFRIEND. We spent every night together, though we had sex only once a week, usually after a movie on a Saturday night, as if it were a requirement to complete the evening. Our sex life reminded me of painting by numbers: uninspired, technically satisfying, vaguely therapeutic. Most nights we lay next to each other in her single bed reading and discussing Anna Karenina until well past midnight. As winter turned to spring, and the scent of lilacs wafted in through the open Gothic window of Rachel’s dorm room, I read the chapter in which Levin has spent all day scything hay in the meadow with the peasants. At the end of the long day, Levin hears their songs and laughter, their joy in life, and realizes that he has found his purpose, that he is ready to renounce all his other wants—marriage, social reform—for this pure and simple life. I found myself powerfully moved. Rachel and I were soul mates, and what could be more divine than lying next to her in the nude every night and reading Tolstoy out loud?

“I feel exactly like Levin. I couldn’t be happier than I am right now,” I confessed.

“Yes,” Rachel said, “but in the next moment Kitty rides by in the carriage and Levin realizes that he’s deluding himself. He can’t be happy without her love.”

EVERY NOW AND THEN RACHEL SAID she wanted to read some of my fiction, but I still hadn’t showed her anything and the winter quarter was nearly over. I was embarrassed to admit I hadn’t written another story as good as “Two by Two.” I had attempted to write stories during the summers, but I felt uninspired, every sentence echoing the sentences of the writers I loved. Writing essays for my classes was easier. I loved shaping arguments, and locating the right tone and language for a paper was not nearly as difficult as writing fiction. Most of all, I loved receiving high grades and high praise.

When I finally confessed to Rachel that I hadn’t written anything better than “Two by Two,” she replied, “So let me read that!”

“But I wrote that in high school.”

“So? It has to be decent if you won that prize.”

I finally relented and gave her a copy one day in my room. She read the story sitting on my bed; I was at my desk, my back to her, trying to read a book, but I kept turning around to look at her.

When she finished, she just stared at me for a couple of seconds. “Seth, this is really good,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“You’re just saying that because you’re my girlfriend,” I replied, though I was actually disappointed she wasn’t more ecstatic.

“I’m being completely straight with you. I was so concerned I wouldn’t like it and wouldn’t know what to say. I think it’s funny and moving. I love it. You ought to be writing fiction.”

“Do you think my fiction is better than my essays for class?”

“That’s comparing apples and oranges.”

We had been exchanging drafts of our papers throughout the term. I had been curious to read Rachel’s essays. Would I really be able to tell the difference between my papers and the papers written by the person regarded as the brightest star in the English Department? I knew the answer after reading just one paragraph of one of her essays. Her ideas were more sophisticated and argued with greater authority and clarity. I didn’t feel competitive with her; in fact, I liked being the boyfriend of someone so smart and accomplished, but reading her essays reminded me of my limits.

“Come on. I need you to be honest with me.” I had just shown her a term paper I had written for my seminar on the modern British novel: “Voyages In and Out: A Comparison of the Forms of Female Heroism in To the Lighthouse and Middlemarch.” I had received an A on the paper. “Do you think this story is better than my To the Lighthouse and Middlemarch paper?”

“I enjoyed the story more.”

“So you’re saying that a story I wrote in high school is better than a senior seminar paper I wrote at the University of Chicago?”

“I’m just saying I enjoyed the story more.”

• • •

AT RACHEL’S URGING, I signed up for Kadish’s advanced creative writing course in the spring quarter. On the first day of class, Kadish read a story titled “My First Fee” by an early twentieth-century Russian writer named Isaac Babel. No one in the class had heard of the story or of Babel. The story was about a twenty-year-old proofreader and would-be writer who goes to an older prostitute named Vera for his first sexual encounter. But when they get to Vera’s room, the young man becomes despondent when Vera removes her clothes and he sees she’s not nearly as beautiful as he had imagined. Vera senses that he’s lost interest, and the young man explains himself by inventing a story about having been a boy prostitute. Vera is visibly moved by the story and pays him a high compliment: “So you’re a whore. A whore like us bitches.” The young man bows his head and replies, “Yes. A whore like you.” Kadish had read those lines with great emotion and laughed at other lines in the story as if he were sharing a private joke with the writer. No one in the class seemed to understand the story except for one girl, who laughed along with Kadish. She had a mass of tousled hair, dark circles under large, round eyes, and full lips. She fidgeted and sniffed a great deal. Kadish asked the class what we thought of the story. No one said anything. Then the girl who had appreciated the story along with Kadish raised her hand.

“Yes, miss. . . ?”

“Katz. But you can call me Cat.”

“Miss Katz.”

“I love the way Babel compares writing to sex.”

“Yes. How so?” Kadish queried her.

“Well, the boy in the story gets his cherry popped. For real, with Vera, but also as a writer, right?”

“He does indeed,” Kadish said.

Every student in the class was required to submit two stories during the term. I decided to use “Two by Two” for my first workshop. I wanted to buy myself some time and to protect myself from Kadish’s annihilating comments by turning in something that I knew was decent. I did wonder whether it was ethical to turn in a story I had already written, so I consulted Rachel.

“Does the syllabus say that you need to turn in stories written expressly for the course?” she asked me.

“No.”

“Then I think you’re fine.”

EVERYONE WAS SITTING AROUND the seminar table with purple mimeographed copies of my story, waiting for Professor Kadish. Tall and bedraggled, he typically showed up to class five minutes late, half his shirt outside his pants, his necktie crooked, and looking vaguely annoyed, as if he had been having sex and suddenly remembered that he had to teach a class. He found his copy of my manuscript, moved his enormous eyeglasses to the crown of his head, and examined the story for a couple of minutes with a look of brutal concentration. Then he moved his glasses back down over his nose and said, “Well, Mr. Shapiro, consciously or unconsciously, is clearly paying hommage to Saul Bellow. But this story is more imitation than inspiration.” Kadish began all the classes this way. He would deliver his verdict and then let the students say what they wanted.

For a couple of seconds the class was silent. Then one of the students said that he agreed with Professor Kadish. The story was too old-fashioned. “It’s like he’s trying to write in the style of a different era.” Two or three more students raised their hands.

“I think the story is too Jewish.”

“How so, Mr. Cantor?” Kadish asked.

“The names. Abraham. Isaac. Chaya?” Some of the students laughed. “I mean, isn’t that a character from Fiddler on the Roof?”

The whole class was laughing.

“I agree,” said another student. “The Old Testament references are so jejune.”

Then one of the students commented that she didn’t find Isaac very likeable, and that criticism opened the floodgates. Nearly everyone in the class said that they felt the same way about Isaac, that they didn’t like him very much and couldn’t sympathize with him. None of the characters were all that likeable except for the grandmother, said a number of students. Then Cat shot her hand up.

“Yes, Miss Katz,” Kadish said.

“I think this business of whether or not we like a character is bullshit,” she declared. “We’re supposed to be interested in characters, not like them. I mean, I think that’s the problem with most of the stories we read in this class. Everyone is trying too hard to create characters we’ll like, and that’s just boring. This is the only story we’ve read in this class where I really wanted to turn the pages. That’s important, don’t you think, Professor Kadish?”

Kadish nodded his head. “Yes, the story is extremely well told. Mr. Shapiro, do you have any questions for us?”

I was seething, but cautioned myself to hold it together. “Hommage? Jejune?” I said. “I think I might find the criticism more useful if people expressed themselves in English.”

All the students stared at me, but Kadish actually smiled, and then Cat nearly keeled over laughing.

When I received my manuscript from Kadish, I turned to the last page to see his comments. Poor man’s Bellow. Technically capable but try writing in your own voice for the next story. B. I went back to my room and reread “The Old System.” I hadn’t read the Bellow in four years, and each page sent waves of relief and shame through me—relief that the judges who awarded me the Scholastic Prize had probably not read “The Old System” and shame that my achievement was totally fraudulent. I had read the Bellow story so many times when I was in high school and had so thoroughly internalized the story’s prose rhythms that the result was just the same as if I had been typing “Two by Two” with one eye on an open copy of “The Old System.” Perhaps I ought to have felt relieved that Kadish hadn’t brought me up on charges of plagiarism, for surely he had read “The Old System.” Then I would have been facing expulsion just before I graduated. The university would never grant me a degree if they found out that I had been admitted on the basis of a plagiarized story.

I met Rachel for dinner in the dining hall. She asked me how my workshop had gone.

“Bad.”

“But I thought you were going to submit ‘Two by Two.’ How could anyone not like that story?”

“Well, they all hated it,” I said angrily, as if it were her fault. I showed her the manuscript with Kadish’s comments.

“He’s an asshole. Anyway, didn’t you tell me his life and writing was a bad imitation of Saul Bellow’s? He’s definitely projecting his own self-loathing onto you.”

“He’s right about my story, Rachel.”

“Seth, don’t do this to yourself.”

“Come to my room. I want you to read something.”

Back in my room, I gave Rachel “The Old System” to read. I sat anxiously at my desk while she lay on my bed and read the story. I felt as if I were revealing my deepest, most shameful secret to her, a feeling that became more intense as I looked over my own story. I could hear Bellow in every sentence.

Rachel closed the book and said she liked my story better.

“Oh, come on, Rachel. I virtually plagiarized that story.”

“I can see the similarities, but you write about women much more sensitively. The women in Bellow’s stories are all grotesques, opening up their vaginas to intimidate small boys or bending over and showing off their pudenda.”

I stared at her, wondering for the first time whether we were really right for each other.

“Thanks. I didn’t think of it that way.”

“Seth, stop punishing yourself. You didn’t do anything bad. Come here,” she said, patting the bed.

I went over to her. She began unbuttoning my shirt, reminding me that I didn’t do anything wrong. “You’re a really good person, Seth,” she said, as she unbuckled my belt.

IN LATE MARCH, we heard from graduate schools. Rachel was admitted to Berkeley and Stanford and offered a full scholarship and stipend for both programs. I was rejected by Harvard and Yale and accepted to the University of Chicago graduate program but without any financial support. The Divinity School had admitted me with a full scholarship and stipend. I tried to look on the bright side—I was graduating from the University of Chicago magna cum laude; I would be supported for another four years of study at the university I loved—but this view didn’t hold up for very long. My rejection from the top graduate schools validated Rachel’s judgment of my potential as a scholar, and despite her praise of “Two by Two,” I knew I had been admitted to the university on the strength of a plagiarized story. I felt like Cinderella at five minutes to midnight. At graduation, I would change back into the person I had always been—mediocre, average, a nobody.

One night, not long after we had heard from all the graduate schools we had applied to, Rachel and I were lying next to each other in bed, and I asked her what was going to happen to us after graduation.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“We can spend Christmas vacations and summers together,” I said. “I could transfer to a graduate program in California.”

“Seth, baby, we have three months before we need to have this conversation. Let’s enjoy the time we have.” She touched my cheek. “You’re going to look so handsome when you’re older,” she said.

“Don’t you think I’m handsome now?” I exclaimed.

“Of course I do,” she said. “I just mean when you’re a hotshot professor, and married with children, you’ll look especially handsome.”

What an odd thing to say, I thought. But I understood she was conceding the limits of our relationship, the limits of her love for me.

I STILL NEEDED TO WRITE another story for Kadish’s class, and the next night at dinner I asked Rachel about a story she had told me not long after we met. When she was twelve she had wanted to leave her mother and live with her father. Her mother, Joan, a therapist in Berkeley, was impulsive and irresponsible, and Rachel couldn’t bear living with her anymore. She wanted some boundaries and normality in her life. Her father was a suburban rabbi and had remarried a woman much closer to him in temperament. Her mother didn’t want to let Rachel go, and Rachel’s parents had waged a custody battle over her. As the case was drawing to a close, the judge presiding over the case had interviewed Rachel privately in his chambers. After questioning her for about twenty minutes, the judge had asked Rachel whom she really wanted to live with. “My mother,” Rachel replied.

“Why do you think you changed your mind so suddenly in the judge’s chambers?” I asked her.

“I just felt I belonged with my mother. Why?”

“I think it’s a great premise for a story.”

“Seth, you are not writing a story about that!”

I was shocked by the vehemence of her response.

“Why not?”

“It’s the most painful episode of my life, that’s why. I don’t want you to write about it.”

“I wouldn’t be writing about you. I’m interested in the moral and psychological complexities of a twelve-year-old child suddenly changing her mind in the judge’s chambers. I mean, it’s very Jamesian, don’t you think?”

“Seth, please. I would consider it a violation of my trust in you if you wrote a story about that.”

I began writing the story anyway. After all, I was just completing an assignment for a class, and Rachel didn’t need to see it. I changed the girl to a boy, set it in New Jersey, and forgot all about Jamesian complexities. I remembered when I was twelve and had wanted to leave my mother too, remembered how a child can feel emotionally responsible for a lunatic parent. The boy in the story was me, or some version of myself, and the mother was a version of my mother. Rachel’s story had provided me a medium through which to tell my own. I had never felt so pure and inspired about anything I had written. I only felt guilty about lying to Rachel. I had never lied to her before, but now I lied to her every time she asked me how the writing was going. “Not great,” I’d tell her. “It’s bad. Really bad.”

FOR THE SECOND TIME THAT TERM, all my classmates were sitting around the seminar table with purple mimeographed copies of a story I had written while we waited for Professor Kadish. No one made eye contact with me except for the girl who called herself Cat. When she came into the room, she said, “Great story, man,” and then sat down across from me, fidgeting, sniffing, pulling on her earrings and sending smiles my way.

Kadish came in ten minutes late. He dropped his books, papers, and keys on the table with a thud, then moved his glasses to the top of his forehead and stared around the room for a couple of seconds, as if looking to see if he was in the right place. “Well, I think we can all agree that this is a highly accomplished story. Mr. Shapiro is a real writer.”

After Kadish pronounced his judgment, most of my classmates praised the story too; some felt bound to offer criticisms, perhaps out of envy, perhaps in an attempt to generate some discussion over the remaining sixty minutes. One student said the word “obdurate” at the end seemed out of place. Someone said that he didn’t think a tallis could actually be rolled up into a tight little ball. Another student said that ending the story with the two characters walking away together seemed like a trite way of exiting the story. Then one student wondered if it would provide more of a twist at the end if the boy changed his mind and decided to stay with his mother. A number of other students became animated by this idea, agreeing that it might provide more of a psychological and dramatic reversal if the boy changed his mind. Of course I had planned on ending the story that way, but when I reached the final scene, I didn’t believe that my character would actually go through with it. The scene that created the most problems for me was the fistfight at the bar mitzvah: It was the one detail in the story that felt like a real betrayal of Rachel.

Finally, Cat raised her hand. Throughout the term, it had been her habit to sit quietly through most of each class and then disagree with the drift of the discussion. Kadish called on her.

“I disagree with what everyone has been saying. If the boy changed his mind and stayed with his mother, the story would be less emotionally complex, less surprising, because that’s the ending we want. He does have a stronger bond with his mother, but he doesn’t understand how much he loves her. That’s why the ending is so beautiful and sad.”

I smiled at her and she winked back at me.

When Kadish gave me back his copy of the manuscript, I turned to the back for the comments. See me about submitting this story for the Chandler Prize and publication in the Chicago Quarterly. A. The Chandler Prize was awarded for the best work of fiction by an undergraduate student. Kadish was the editor of the Chicago Quarterly, a literary magazine published by the University of Chicago Press. I went to Kadish’s office after class, knocked on the door, and waited for close to a minute before he opened it and stared at me.

“Yes, Mr. Shapiro?”

“You told me to see you about the Chandler Prize and the Chicago Quarterly?”

“Oh, right. Hold on a minute.”

Kadish went back into his office and closed the door. After another minute, he came back out and stood in the doorway.

“Here’s the form you need to submit your story for the contest. The deadline is tomorrow. You ought to be notified of the results in about a week.”

I asked him who the judges were.

“Just me.”

“You also said something about publication in the Chicago Quarterly.”

“Yes. I’d like to publish the story if it’s all right with you.”

“Yes. Thank you very much.”

Kadish nodded his head and then went back into his office.

I waltzed and whizzed my way down the four flights, holding the copy of my story with Kadish’s comments as if it were a prize-winning lottery ticket. Bursting out of Cobb Hall, I heard my name. I turned around and saw the girl from class who called herself Cat.

“Hi, what’s up?” I said.

“Which way are you going?”

I pointed down Sixtieth Street.

“Me too.”

“You know, I don’t even know your real name,” I said to her.

“Not many people do.”

“So, will you tell me?”

She stopped. “Well, only because you wrote such a great story.” Then she put her warm, pillowy lips against my ear and whispered, “Bella.”

“Bella,” I repeated. “Bella Katz.” Her vowels were flattened by a midwestern accent. “Highland Park?” I asked.

“Close. Shaker Heights.” She paused. “So, look, would you like to go get a drink?”

“Well, I sort of have a girlfriend.”

“You ‘sort of’ do or you really do?”

“I really do,” I replied.

Her eyes became slits. “You know, I really wish you had let me know that before I told you my real name.”

I looked at the ground and apologized. She burst out laughing. “Oh, man, I’m just yanking your chain. Thanks for not being a dog.”

“You’re welcome.”

She lit a cigarette and said she was going back to the quad.

“You’re not really going this way?”

She laughed again. “Too bad you have a girlfriend. I could have a lot of fun with you.”

I met Rachel just outside the entrance to the dining hall. She kissed me on the lips and asked me how the class had gone.

“Pretty well,” I said. “I’ll tell you when we sit down.” Before the class, I had planned to simply lie to Rachel: I would tell her that everyone in the class had hated my story and that I didn’t want to show it to her. But I was so excited about Kadish’s praise, so sure the story itself would redeem me, that I knew I couldn’t pull off the lie I had invented for just this moment. Nothing I had ever done in my life had felt so right, so true, as writing that story, and Kadish’s judgment had left me swelling with virtue.

We went through the line with our trays and found our usual small table.

“So Kadish loved my story,” I said. “He wants me to submit it for the Chandler Prize.” I decided to wait for her reaction before I told her about the Chicago Quarterly.

“Seth, that’s wonderful! Especially because you didn’t think the story was very good. I’m so proud of you. So . . . can I read it now?”

I reached in my knapsack and pulled out a copy for her.

“‘A Stranger on the Planet,’” she read. “I like that title.” But when she began reading the opening lines, her face became contorted with pain. Then she started turning the pages rapidly, scanning each one for just a couple of seconds. She slowed down when she was nearly at the end. I knew she was reading the scene in which the mother and stepmother get into a fistfight. I wanted her to speed through those pages too, but she studied them with a stunned look, the way someone reads and rereads a letter containing shocking news.

Finally, she looked up at me. “I cannot believe you did this. You promised me, Seth!”

“I just used some details you told me. The story is about me, not you.”

“Do you know how violated I feel?”

“Rachel, no one who reads this story is going to connect it with you. I think you’ll understand if you just read the whole thing.”

“I’ve read enough,” she said, and banged the story down on the table. Plates clattered, and people turned to look at us. Then she leaned across the table and said in a low but furious voice, “You fucking liar.”

“Liar? What did I lie about? I’m not hiding the story from you.”

“When you kept telling me it was bad. You were so happy and giddy during the eight weeks you were writing this story, you had to know it was good. You lying, scheming asshole!”

She stood up to leave, slipping on her coat and hoisting onto her shoulder her knapsack in one deft motion.

“But I changed the ending,” I said, as if that might exonerate me.

“Fuck you,” she said, and left me sitting alone.

THAT NIGHT I SLEPT BY MYSELF for the first time since Rachel and I had gone to the blues bar back in February. During the week, Rachel wasn’t in any of our usual places: our table in the dining hall or the section on the third floor of Regenstein where we studied together. She didn’t return any of the telephone messages I left for her. The image of the battered look on her face as she read the story kept me awake at night—I don’t think I had ever caused another person so much pain—but I would end up arguing with her in my head. She was a brilliant student of literature; how could she not understand the process of how an author transforms life into art? Kadish had been right about “Two by Two”: The germ of the plot might have come from an incident out of my childhood, but I had directly appropriated Bellow’s way of telling a Jewish story. But “A Stranger on the Planet” was my story. If Kadish had reported me to the admissions office after reading “Two by Two” and the university had decided to expel me, I would have more easily understood that punishment than Rachel’s reaction. She was treating me as if I were as egotistical and as boorish as Tolstoy. Compared to the way Tolstoy treated Sonya, I was a saint. A goddamned saint! Still, I sent her a letter of apology, saying no story was worth the sacrifice of our relationship. She didn’t reply; perhaps she knew I was lying: I didn’t regret writing the story.

A week later, I received a letter notifying me that “A Stranger on the Planet” had won the Chandler Prize for undergraduate fiction. Along with the letter was a check for one hundred dollars and an announcement of all the winners of the English Department’s undergraduate writing prizes. Rachel had won for best literary criticism. She would have received the same announcement. I left another message for Rachel congratulating her, but she didn’t call me back.

I was graduating in a month. I had harbored hopes that Rachel and I might maintain a long-distance relationship, but now I wondered if she would even be speaking to me at commencement. Recalling Kadish’s pronouncement about me in class—Mr. Shapiro is a real writer—pumped me up with more self-righteousness and defiance, and I decided to call Bella Katz. She answered on the first ring.

“Bella?”

“Come again?”

“Cat?”

“Seth, what’s up?”

“How did you know it was me?”

“I told you. Not many people know my real name.”

“I was wondering if you’d like to get a drink.”

“Don’t you have a girlfriend anymore?”

I spent about five minutes explaining, in an aggrieved and self-righteous fashion, everything that had happened between Rachel and me. I expected her to be appalled at Rachel’s crude reaction to my art and to sympathize with my principled positions, but she said she would only go out with me on one condition.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t want to hear any stories about how your girlfriend doesn’t understand you.”

“Sure, fine,” I replied.

Bella’s standard attire was patched blue jeans and oversized peasant blouses, so I was surprised at how beautiful she looked without her clothes on. Everything about her was full and round: her eyes and lips, hips and breasts, the swell of her thighs. Nude, she had a glow and grace about her that I had never noticed when she was so indifferently clothed. I tried not to compare her with Rachel, tried not to think about how boring our love life had always been, but when Bella lay on top of me, kissing my lips, softly, lusciously, I remembered what sex was supposed to feel like, remembered how my legs had quivered when Zelda had put her hand on my penis ten years before.

Later, lying next to me, she said, “So is your girlfriend a lesbian?”

“What? No, of course not! Why would you say that?”

“You really know how to use your tongue. Someone had to teach you those moves.”

I might have told her that I had developed those moves because I had read The Bell Jar in high school and become phobic about having sex with a virgin, but I recognized an opening and pounced. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

Her eyes welled up for a moment. “Look, man, I think we both know why you called me.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because you wanted some babe who appreciated your story to fuck you.”

“That’s not fair,” I protested.

“So? It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Then why did you go out with me?”

“Because I like you and I wanted to fuck you too. But it’s all right if you don’t call again. I know you still want to get back together with your girlfriend.”

My face probably fell by a couple of inches.

“Look, it’s a human thing, Seth. You knew I liked your story, and you knew that I was hot for you, so you called me up. You don’t have to feel bad about being human.”

“I guess.”

“You’re nice, Seth, but you’re not as nice as you want everyone to think you are. I mean, you are being a little bit of a dog.”

“So do you want me to leave?”

“Remember that story Kadish read on the first day of class? ‘My First Fee.’”

“Yes.”

“Remember when the narrator said he wasn’t planning on writing down any of his stories until he was as great as Tolstoy?”

“Yes, so? Your point is . . .?”

“My point is that we just had some really amazing sex, but it never would have happened if you believed you had to be a saint every minute of the day.”

I gave her a puzzled look. She laughed and said, “Oh, Seth, if I had expected this was going to be more than a one-night stand, I wouldn’t have let you see how smart I am.”

I wanted to protest that Rachel was one of the smartest people in the world, but before I could say anything, Bella laid her head on my chest and said, “Stay the night?”

“All right.”

“I love sex in the morning. Don’t you?”

I HAD NOT HEARD FROM MY FATHER since my fireshman year, but I still made sure the registrar sent him a copy of my grades every term so he could see how well I was doing. My sadness over Rachel reminded me of how much I missed him, reminded me that I was always disappointing the people I most wanted to love me. I decided to invite him to my graduation. In the letter I wrote to him, I expressed my hope that we could use this happy day as an occasion to mend our relationship. I told him that I was graduating magna cum laude and had won the Chandler Prize. I recalled how my father had written “EXTRA ORDINARY” in response to “Two By Two,” and, after a moment of internal debate, I decided to include a copy of “A Stranger on the Planet.”

A week later, I received my father’s reply:

Dear Seth,

Congratulations on your fine academic achievements. I would like very much to attend your graduation, but your letter did not include an invitation for my wife. Moreover, you still have not apologized for your vulgar outburst to her three years ago. I hope you will honestly examine the untenable situation you have created for me. Hortense and I are not interested in a relationship without a baseline of common courtesy.

Sincerely,

Dad

P.S. In the future, please address all your correspondence to both Hortense and me.

Sarah was graduating from Rutgers in a week. I phoned her and asked if our father was attending.

“Dad, Horty, Francois. The whole happy family.” “Francois too? How old is he now? Thirteen or something?” “I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you. He’s always looked up to you.”

A year earlier, I had shown Sarah a copy of a letter Francois had written to me. Dear Seth, How goes it in collage land, where

men are men, women are women, and collage professors tend to be gay. He had included a poem that he had written and asked for my opinion of it. I showed it to Dad, but he told me it sucked out-loud. Love (not the gay kind), Francois.

“Well, Dad’s not coming to my graduation,” I said.

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised.”

“Thanks for the sympathy.”

“Seth,” she said, the tone in her voice softer, more empathetic, “he’s never going to change. I know it’s difficult for you, but you have to stop hoping that he’s going to love you someday.”

“I know. I know. . . . So how did Mom react when you told her that Hortense is going to be there?”

“I haven’t told her yet.”

“You haven’t? She’s going to have a fit.”

“I know. So I don’t see any point in telling her until the very last moment.”

“Did you consider not inviting Hortense for Mom’s sake?”

“Dad owes me five thousand dollars upon graduation. I’m not going to jeopardize that money by antagonizing him.”

“What if he wanted you to invite Joseph Goebbels? Would you do that for five thousand dollars?”

“I love you too, Seth,” she replied, and hung up.

I had a box in which I kept all my father’s letters. When I went to store away his most recent one, I found one he had written to me ten years earlier in response to a letter I had sent him after Eddie had broken my nose.

Dear Seth,

Hortense and I discussed your problem and we both believe that it would be impractical for you to live with us. Both of us work all day and you would be without adult supervision for too many hours. We both agree that you need to get away from your present situation and we think the best solution is for you to attend a boarding school. The tuition is really beyond our means (our vacation on the Cape last summer was our first in four years!), but we believe that the financial sacrifices on our part would be well worth it. Choate or Andover would be excellent choices. Let us know what you think. By the way, your mother called me three times last week to insist that Eddie did not punch you in the nose. She modified her story, explaining that you and Eddie were playing and that he accidentally fell on you. I have no comment except to say that the whole situation is bizarre.

Love,

Dad and Hortense

Eddie hadn’t actually punched me. One Sunday near the end of August 1969, Eddie and I had been sitting next to each other on the couch watching baseball. He had been in his bathrobe all day, hadn’t shaved, and was in his usual posture, bent forward, one hand on the channel dial, changing back and forth between the Yankee and Mets games. I told him to quit it, that I had already missed hundreds of pitches. He replied that this was his house and that he could do whatever he wanted. I told him that this wasn’t his house. He was living here for free.

“You little snot-nosed brat,” he said, putting his face right in front of mine. “You’re one word away from a serious bruising.”

“Word,” I said.

Suddenly he was on me, placing me in a headlock. I tried to bolt, but he fell on top of me with all his weight. I landed on my nose and blood spurted everywhere. I failed violently under him, calling him a “goddamn gorilla.” My mother came out from her bedroom. “Oh stop this,” she cried. “The two of you, just stop this!” Eddie let me up, and I put my hand to my nose. At the sight of my blood I became enraged and punched him in the mouth, bloodying his lip. I could see in his eyes that he was frightened of me, and I became wilder, punching him two more times in the face before fleeing down the steps and out the door. I walked the streets for about an hour. My nose felt like it was wadded up with cotton, and an intense pain pinched me between the eyes. My cheeks were scraped red where his beard had scoured against me.

The next day I woke up with two black eyes and my nose still hurt. My mother took me to the emergency room of the hospital. She told the doctor on duty that I had tripped and fallen. A week later, I had surgery to repair my broken nose. I left the hospital looking like a raccoon—a white cast over my nose and two black eyes. When the kids in the neighborhood and at the town pool asked me what had happened, I told them I’d had brain surgery.

I had gone along with the lie my mother had told the doctor in the emergency room, but after my surgery I realized my broken nose was my ticket out. I wrote my father a letter telling him that Eddie had punched me and broken my nose. I added that my mother and Eddie fought constantly with each other and I was afraid Eddie would get violent with me again. I said I wanted to come live with him, reminding him that the school year began in a week and it would be great if I could start the term in Cambridge.

Returning the ten-year-old letter to the box, I knew that Sarah was right about our father: He would never change. He was going to her graduation because all she expected from him was the five thousand dollars he owed her for going to Rutgers. He wasn’t coming to my graduation because I expected him to love me unconditionally.

MY MOTHER WAS WAITING for me at Newark Airport. The moment I caught sight of her—inhaling deeply on a cigarette, a distraught look in her eyes—I knew that Sarah had told her about Hortense.

I bent down to kiss her, but she didn’t bother to say hello.

“God give me strength to get through this weekend,” she sighed.

In the car, she lit another cigarette.

“Mom, we’ll be home in thirty minutes. Can’t you wait until then to light up?”

“Look, Seth, I’m going through a very traumatic time right now. You don’t know how upsetting it is to me that that woman is going to be at my daughter’s graduation.”

She began to cry, and I decided I would rather deal with the cigarette fumes than my mother’s hysteria.

The next morning we drove to New Brunswick. Seamus sat in the front. I was lying down in the backseat, trying to nap, but in my mind I kept repeating to myself, How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. I had been up until five in the morning writing an English paper for my brother on As I Lay Dying. Seamus was an excellent student—he had been admitted to Brandeis—but his strengths were science and math. He was diligent and bright enough to do well in his English courses, but he was thoroughly stymied by As I Lay Dying. The night before, I had tried to discuss it with him.

“Doesn’t the family in the book remind you a little of us?” I had asked him.

“Us? You don’t really think we’re as strange as the family in this book.”

“Think of your name. Seamus Shapiro. That’s as strange as any of the names in the book. Jewel. Vardaman. Darl.”

“You always exaggerate things.”

“I know, but that’s what helps me understand the book.”

“Maybe I’m too literal to understand literature.”

“See? We’re like the family in the novel. All the siblings are different. Cash is literal and responsible, just like you. I’m a combination of Jewel and Darl. Angry, romantic, overly vulnerable.”

I could see that Seamus was processing this information.

“Does that help?” I said.

“Actually, it does.”

“So, we’re also like the Bundren family because we can’t communicate our deepest feelings to each other.”

“I don’t agree with that.”

“All right. Think about this. Dad is like Addie. He’s not present, but he’s still a powerful force in our lives. We still define ourselves in relation to him.”

“I don’t agree with that either. Dad is more like the father in the novel. Self-centered. Not very honorable. I don’t think of Dad as our family anyway. You, Sarah, me, and Mom. That’s our family unit.”

I told Seamus that maybe it would be easier if I just wrote down some of my ideas and then he could use them however he wanted. At nine o’clock, I sat down at the same desk I had avoided all through high school when I had homework. By five in the morning, I had written twenty pages about siblings and parents, language and loneliness. When I finally did go to bed, my mind was so revved up that I couldn’t fall asleep. Lines from the book kept pulsing through my head, viscerally as a beating heart. I realized this was the way I read, and I forgave myself a little for “Two by Two.”

In the morning, I showed Seamus what I had written. For the first time that I could recall, my younger brother expressed admiration for me.

“I’m amazed at how well you understand this book,” Seamus said. “It was incomprehensible to me.”

I found myself feeling amazed too, amazed that Seamus and I had grown up in the same apartment, experienced the same two parents, but had turned into such completely different people. He had directly told our father all the things I had always wanted to say myself, but Seamus had been more adult about it than I could ever have been. I had expressed years of pent-up hurt by telling Hortense to go fuck herself.

Seamus asked me if I thought it was ethical to use what I had written for him.

“It’s fine,” I replied, “as long as you just use the ideas and don’t copy any of the sentences.”

“Are you sure?”

“I was writing it for you, Seamus, not for a class. I was thinking of you when I wrote it; I was thinking of our family, so the ideas are just as much yours as mine.”

RUTH CHAIN-SMOKED THROUGHOUT the long drive to New Brunswick. She had her window down, but the wind just blew the smoke into the backseat. I thought: My mother is a fish. My mother smokes like a fish.

The commencement exercises at Rutgers were huge, and I wondered if we would even see my father. Sarah had told Ruth where to meet her after the ceremony; perhaps, thinking strategically, she had told our father to meet her at another location. Afterward, as we walked to the spot Sarah had designated for our meeting, I could see that my father, Hortense, and Francois were already there, standing with Sarah. Ruth spotted them a second later. “Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty,” she sighed.

As we approached, I could tell that my mother was trying to summon tears. She held out her arms and embraced Sarah for a long time. When she pulled back, her eyes were indeed damp and her mascara a little smudged. “I can’t believe my baby girl is a college graduate!” Then everyone stood around doing their best to avoid eye contact. Hortense and Francois were standing a couple of feet behind my father. I noticed that Hortense had written Merde! all over the commencement program. Francois was wearing blue-jean overalls with a tie-dyed T-shirt underneath. His golden waves of Pre-Raphaelite hair fell to his shoulders. He was ignoring all of us, reading a paperback book—Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.

Finally my mother turned to my father and extended her hand.

“Hello, Elliot. How are you?”

“Very well, Ruth. Thank you. Would you like to say hello to Hortense?”

“I’m standing right here if she’d like to say hello to me.”

Elliot stepped to the side. “Hallo,” Hortense said. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Ruth replied. “I have much to be proud of.” Then she said to our father, “Aren’t you going to say hello to your sons?”

He gave Seamus and me a tight-lipped smile. “Hello, boys.”

“Hello, Horty. How are you?” I said to Hortense. Sarah glared at me, but Francois’s lips had curled into a smile.

“I see you brought some light reading for the commencement,” I said to him.

“This whole commencement thing is so pseudo,” Francois declared.

“You mean like your pseudo farmer’s clothing?” I asked.

Our father erupted into laughter; we had the same high-pitched, obnoxious laugh. Francois gave him a malevolent look and then banged his copy of Notes from Underground down on our father’s Leica.

“Watch it!” our father said angrily.

“Oh, no! Did I harm the Holy Orifice?” Francois replied.

Hortense began speaking to her husband in very fierce French. I noticed tears sliding down her cheeks from beneath her enormous sunglasses.

“All right, Sarah, we’re leaving now,” our father announced.

“You mean we’re not all going out to lunch together?” I said.

“Why? So you can write a story about it?” my father answered.

“What story?” Ruth asked. “Seth, did you write a story?”

“No, I didn’t write a story,” I said.

“Then what did your father mean?”

“Nothing. He didn’t mean anything.”

“All right, Sarah,” our father repeated impatiently, “we’re going.” He handed her an envelope. “Congratulations.”

Then he turned around and walked away with his wife and son.

Sarah looked at me. “You two are just like each other.”

“Who?” Ruth asked. “Who is just like each other?”

“Nobody,” Sarah replied.

“Seth is nothing like your father, if that’s what you mean,” Ruth said.

I resisted reminding my mother of all the times she had taunted me by saying, “Elliot Shapiro! Elliot Shapiro! You’re just like him.”

“I feel so sorry for their child,” Ruth said. “I tell you, I must have done something right with the three of you.”

Sarah said she was famished and wanted to go get some lunch.

“Oh, before I forget,” Ruth said, searching around in her purse, “I have something for you from the Zelmans.” She handed Sarah two envelopes. When Sarah opened the second, she spent about a minute reading the letter inside it, then her eyes welled up and brimmed over with tears.

“It’s from Aaron,” Ruth whispered to me.

Later that afternoon, as we were returning to the car after lunch, Sarah held me back for a moment and asked me if I could spend the night. Her roommate, Carrie, had moved out, she explained, and she didn’t want to spend the night alone in her room in a half-empty dorm.

Ruth looked upset when we reached the car and I told her I was staying with Sarah.

“How are you going to get home?” she said.

“The bus.”

“When did you plan this?” she asked us.

“About a minute ago,” Sarah answered.

“Nobody tells me anything,” Ruth sighed.

That night, after we had turned out the lights to go to sleep, I asked Sarah what Aaron had said in his letter. I knew she wanted me to stay so we could discuss it.

“He said that he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about me for the last two years and he hopes we can get together.”

“Do you still think about him?”

“All the time.”

“So why don’t you give him a chance?”

“I can’t get past the way his father sexually manipulated Mom.”

“So? That doesn’t mean he’s like his father.”

“He loves his father.”

“I love Dad, but that doesn’t mean I’m like him.”

“Maybe so,” she said.

“Did Dad give you the five thousand dollars?”

“Yes. It was in the envelope he handed to me.”

“Go to Italy and invite Aaron to join you.”

“That sounds too nice.”

“I have a graduation present for you.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I hereby give you permission to be happier than Mom without feeling guilty about it.”

She was silent for a few seconds. Then I heard her quietly crying.

“Thank you,” she finally said. “That’s a very nice present.”

“Do you really think I’m like Dad?”

“No, but you try to be. It’s very strange. Why would you want to be like him?”

She was right. My sister had created a self by becoming the inverse of our mother: She was pragmatic and kept her feelings to herself. I hadn’t created an identity so much as I had mastered an impersonation of my father—the sound of his voice, his speech rhythms, his mordant sense of humor, his discipline. But that’s all it was—an impersonation of someone I could never really become. I might have been conscious of being under Bellow’s spell when I wrote “Two by Two,” but I hadn’t realized the extent to which I had also been creating a character of whom my father would approve. If Isaac, my protagonist, wasn’t very likeable, it wasn’t because I had been trying to create a complex character; it was because I was trying to invent a version of myself—scientific, studious, emotionally detached—that my father would love.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am.

TWO DAYS LATER, back in Chicago, I found Rachel sitting alone at our regular table in the dining hall. I took it as an encouraging sign and approached the table with my tray.

“Can I join you?”

“If you want.”

I sat down and Rachel asked me about Sarah’s graduation.

“Stranger than you could imagine.”

She gave me a small smile; I decided to test the temperature between us.

“Francois banged my father’s Leica with his copy of Notes from Underground.”

Rachel was laughing now.

“I’ve missed you,” I said, and extended my hand across the table. “Do you forgive me?”

“No.” Then she took my hand and said, “But I’ve missed you too.”

“Friends?”

“Yes. Friends.”

That night we shared a bed again, and I read to her from As I Lay Dying. Before turning out the lights and going to sleep, I confessed that I had slept with another woman. Rachel thanked me for telling her.

“You’re not upset?” I said.

“No. We had stopped seeing each other. You had every right to go out with another woman.”

How could she feel so betrayed by my story but apparently feel nothing when I confessed that I had slept with Bella? I had told myself that I was confessing to Rachel because it was the right thing to do, that I didn’t want us to have any secrets between us. But hearing her reaction, I admitted to myself that I had told her about Bella because I had wanted to see if she was capable of sexual jealousy.

Two weeks later, Rachel and I sat next to each other in Rockefeller Chapel for the commencement ceremony. As I paged through the program, I noticed that it listed all the prizes awarded to undergraduates, and I prayed that my mother wouldn’t see that I had won the Chandler Prize. Rachel had told her father and stepmother to meet her at the corner of Blackstone and Fifty-ninth Street and her mother to meet her at Kenmore and Fifty-ninth. She would see her mother immediately after the ceremony and then go out to lunch with her father and stepmother. We would go out to dinner that night with our mothers and Sarah and Seamus.

When we came out of Rockefeller Chapel, Ruth, Sarah, and Seamus were standing right out in front. Ruth was smiling, but she didn’t look happy.

“You didn’t tell me you won a fiction prize!” she exclaimed.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said.

“So am I going to get to read this story?” She sounded thoroughly aggrieved.

“Sure,” I said, and then introduced Rachel to my family.

“Very nice to meet you,” Ruth said.

Rachel told me she needed to go meet her mother. She kissed me on the lips and said she would see us later.

My mother stared at me.

“Is she your girlfriend?”

“It looks that way.”

She turned to my brother and sister. “Did either of you know your brother had a girlfriend?”

Sarah admitted that she did; Seamus said it was news to him.

“How come I’m the last one around here to know anything?”

“Mom, I just graduated magna cum laude from the University of Chicago. Can you try to be happy?”

That night we all went out to dinner at the Berghoff. As I expected, Seamus was scrutinizing the menu as if he were in a Torah study group, looking for anything without a trace of treyf, and Ruth blanched when she saw the prices. Then I announced that Rachel and I were using our prize money to treat everyone to dinner. Ruth turned to Joan, Rachel’s mother. “Do we have the most wonderful children in the world?”

“I would say so,” Joan replied. “Rachel and I are so close I tell everyone we’re more like sisters.”

“My son and daughter are best friends. That’s one of my proudest achievements as a mother.”

Sarah downed her wine and whispered to Rachel and me, “I’m going to need a lot of alcohol to get through the evening.”

“Me too,” Rachel murmured back, and swallowed her glass of wine.

Rachel and Sarah both laughed.

“What? What’s so funny?” Ruth exclaimed.

“Nothing, Mom,” I replied, and poured wine into her glass. Ruth drank it all in one gulp.

Then Joan asked me if I had ever been in therapy.

“Mom!” Rachel hissed.

I squeezed her hand under the table. “No, I haven’t,” I answered.

Ruth’s eyes were shiny from the alcohol. “Oh, he’d probably just tell the psychiatrist what a bad mother I was,” she commented.

Seamus, still puzzling over the menu, suddenly looked up and exclaimed, “Mom, I’m sure Seth would never do that! I’m sure Seth appreciates that you’ve tried your best to be a good mother.”

Joan returned her attention to me. “I think you might find therapy extremely helpful to your writing. I have a number of clients who are writers, and our therapy has helped them to unlock their creativity. I’ve been doing regression therapy with one of them, and he’s found it a very empowering experience.”

“I’m afraid if I regress any more I’ll turn into an embryo,” I told her.

Both Rachel and Sarah burst out laughing, but our mothers looked perplexed. Then Ruth said, “Well, actually, Seth and Sarah experienced a very traumatic birth.”

“Mom!” Sarah and I said simultaneously.

“Don’t tell that story at the table,” Sarah said.

But of course Ruth went ahead and told it. She recounted how after the obstetrician had untangled the cords, he had immediately put his mouth over mine and sucked out a plug of mucus. After Ruth related this detail, I turned to Rachel and said, “Now, aren’t you glad you know that? By the way, how are you enjoying your schnitzel?”

Ruth continued the story. We were on respirators for ten days, she said, and it was touch and go, but a rabbi came to pray over us. When she came to the part in which Sarah and I were finally able to breathe on our own, she said, “I thanked the doctor, but the doctor said, ‘Don’t thank me.’”

Sarah and I interjected in unison: “Was anybody praying!” My sister and I laughed, but Ruth looked distraught. “Thanks a lot,” she said to us. “Thanks for absolutely nothing!” I poured more wine into her glass. “Drink up, Mom. Try to be happy.”

TWO DAYS LATER, I sent my mother a copy of “A Stranger on the Planet.” On the way to the airport, she had reminded me three times to send her my story. She wrote back right away.

Dear Seth,

I cried when I read your story. I’m crying now, as I write this letter, just thinking about how beautiful it is. Your love for me comes through in the story, but it was still painful for me to see my faults so exposed. I cried the most when I came to the scene of you and me placing our fingertips on the balloon so that Nanny Esther would recognize the pressure from our fingers when the balloon reached heaven. Of course I remember the day we did that at Wollaston beach in Quincy, but you were only four years old. How could you possibly remember that? I know I wasn’t a very good mother to you, and I felt great guilt after reading the story. Well, I suppose that’s my cross to bear. I’m overwhelmed by your talent and memory.

Thank you for your love and honesty. May the next one hundred and twenty years be full of happiness for you.

Love,

Mom

Immediately after reading my mother’s letter, I walked from my dorm room to campus and found Professor Kadish in his office.

“Yes, Mr. Shapiro, what can I do for you?”

“Is my story really going to be published in the Chicago Quarterly?”

“Yes. I didn’t send an official letter of acceptance because I thought we had an understanding. Why? Do you want to try one of the national magazines? It’s fine with me if you do.”

“No, it’s not that. I think my story has some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Some of it is too directly borrowed from Henderson the Rain King.”

“How so? I didn’t notice any similarities.”

I brought out my copy of the book. “On page thirty, Henderson’s Hungarian violin teacher says, ‘Dear, take de bow like dis vun, not like dis vun, so.’ In my story, the mother’s Romanian patient says, ‘No, darlink, you must do like dis one.’”

Kadish laughed. “That’s nothing. Not a big deal.”

I had never seen Kadish so warm and gracious.

“But I was very conscious of borrowing from Henderson.”

“Everything is fine, Mr. Shapiro. You’ve earned your success.”

Of course I really wasn’t concerned about any similarities between my story and Henderson the Rain King. When I read my mother’s letter, I thought of how she had sacrificed herself for me by fucking Abe Zelman. I thought of her lying beneath his huge brown belly for all those minutes because of the words I’d said and couldn’t say.

“Professor Kadish, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not publish the story.”

Kadish stared at me for a moment. “Very well. If that’s what you want.” Then he returned his attention to the papers on his desk. I felt shattered; he wasn’t even going to ask me why, or encourage me to reconsider.

“Some people might be very hurt if I publish the story.”

“If you say so.”

“Don’t you see how that might be possible?”

Kadish looked up at me. “My daughter told me you were one of the nicest men she’s ever met,” he said.

He had discussed me with his daughter! He knew we were friends! For a moment I wanted to retract my retraction.

“Thank you,” I said, but I knew he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

ON OUR LAST NIGHT TOGETHER, Rachel and I made love slowly and ardently. She was moving back to California the next day. I kissed every inch of her. Perhaps, despite all the kisses I had planted on her body over the past six months, I had missed a secret spot, like a hidden door, which, if kissed, would send her falling madly, hopelessly in love with me.

Afterward, she cried in my arms. “I don’t understand why I don’t love you more than I do,” she said. “You’re exactly the type of man I’ve always wanted to fall in love with. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Right city, wrong season,” I said.

“What does that mean?” Rachel asked.

“Don’t you remember that’s what Professor Krzyzowski said about teaching Tolstoy during the winter term? I keep thinking that applies to us. We’re in the right city, but something’s wrong.”

“We’ll be friends for life. I know we will.”

I didn’t really believe her. I recognized myself as emotionally lazy, not the type of person to keep up a long-distance friendship. But then six months after she moved to California, Rachel called me up and told me she had a woman lover. She asked me if I was weirded out. I said no, not at all. I was relieved, actually. Her revelation explained everything. When we were boyfriend and girlfriend, we had never discussed sex, but that was all we talked about after Rachel realized she loved women. We had found our true topic, our theory of everything. In the years to come, we would go on vacations together, and we always shared the same bed. Camping out in the Sierras, or lying next to each other at night in a rental cottage on Wellfleet, enveloped by the scent of pine and sea air coming in through the bedroom window, she would tell me all about her lovers, tell me how one woman loves another woman. I felt as if I were hearing the deepest secrets a woman could tell a man, and I never wrote another story again.