6

THAT CHRISTMAS was the first year we didn’t have a tree. I don’t remember the earliest ones, but the pictures in the family album show me tiny trees, small enough for my mother to carry alone, austerely decorated with all-white ornaments. The presents were wrapped in white too, tied with identical ribbons, and I was displayed next to them to be frozen by the flash bulb. Those photos, which my father must have received while he was sweating it out on his tin can in the Pacific, look as though they were designed by my mother to capture all the mythic symbols of home: tree and presents white as Christmas snow, infant son arranged against a backdrop of safety, the familiar corner of our dining room. I’m staring straight at the camera (at my mother) with huge eyes; I appear to be dazzled by the light.

But the Christmas trees I’ll never forget are the ones after my father came home from the war. We’d hear him stumbling up the stairs, helped by a pal or two, under the load of something not quite as big as a redwood. I’d hide behind a chair and watch them heave and groan and laugh, threaten the panes of the bay window, while my mother waved her arms frantically and clucked like a hen. Those enormous trees persisted well into my teens, long enough for me to have my chance to join in the rite: the interminable whiskey-lubricated conference with the man in the lot about which one was really the biggest and best, the Laurel and Hardy fight up the stairs with it, and then decorating the damned thing, beginning with deliberations as formal and complex as a UN debate but ending close to riot, me as drunk as my father, both of us wildly pitching tinsel from across the room. It was my mother who always placed the angel on the top just before we went to bed.

I stood in our bay window that year and felt the absence of a tree far more keenly than I had expected. I’d been telling myself that I no longer cared about the ancient rituals of Christmas, that I no longer cared about my family—that I was a self-ultimating artist with my own problems a million miles from anything that people like my parents could understand—but it wasn’t working, and every day I felt myself sinking deeper into a sticky nostalgic melancholy.

At Christmas everything was forgiven. My father no longer had to hide his bottles but could bring them in by the case, as triumphant and grinning as a baron, because, after all, we had to have something in the house for the holiday. And, as people dropped in for Christmas cheer, the cold war between my mother’s and father’s families was temporarily suspended.

My mother’s uncle, Ron McNair, our candidate for Scrooge, had a good paying job on the B&O line, bought so much stock in AT&T that we used to joke that he personally owned all of the wall phones in the state of West Virginia, and was as tight as a tomcat’s asshole. (He’d refused to lend my mother ten bucks once when my father was “out of town” and she and I were living on macaroni and baked beans. “It’s not the money,” he’d told her, “it’s the principle of the thing.”) But Christmas touched even him, and he always managed to come up with small presents for everyone, even for my father’s uncle, O. E. Dupre, who’d never held a regular job in his life and popped in and out of the state loony bin at Weston like a cuckoo in a clock.

I remembered Christmas dinners with so many people that my mother had to unfold all of her bridge tables and disguise them with white linen. Christmas was her one chance a year to use everything—the crystal, china, and silver that had come down to her from the various lines of our family. Even before I’d turned eighteen, my father had begun to include among my presents one that was always the same: a case of beer tied with red ribbon. And when I’d been dating Linda, she’d joined us for dinner the day after Christmas, and I’d given her those gifts my mother always warned me were “too personal” (an amethyst pendant on a gold chain, matching gloves and purse). For days our house would feel too small, jammed with friends and neighbors and relatives, an aunt or uncle sleeping in the guest room, or some friend of my father’s, who would have known better than to darken our door at any other time of the year, passed out on the couch.

This year our house felt too big, hollow, about as much like home as the Raysburg bus terminal at four in the morning. My father had been out of the hospital only a few weeks. The stroke had blasted his entire right side into immobility. He lay in bed with the shades half drawn, the television set going constantly with the volume on low. From midmorning until sign-off time, I heard the distant murmur of game shows and soap operas, thrillers and domestic comedies, news and talk shows. With his mobile left hand he was teaching himself to smoke cigarettes again, but my mother had to feed him. He was learning how to talk, could now manage a few strained nouns that were always instructions: “the light,” “the blinds,” “water,” “bathroom.”

I forced myself to sit in his room for at least an hour every day. I couldn’t tell if he wanted me there or not. It was hard to connect that destroyed figure on the bed with anyone I knew. Was this really the same man who’d slid around town on the fat social oil of scores of pals and drinking buddies, the midnight poker player and Vitalis-slicked tomcat I remembered wearing wing-tipped shoes and pleated pants as he’d spun out yards of fabulous bullshit, glib lies, and tall tales in front of his silent and suspicious son, the man who’d always worn an air of noblesse oblige pungent as his expensive men’s cologne even when he’d pissed away his last nickel?

My mother kept talking about his stroke, telling me the same story. She knew she’d told it to me before, but she seemed compelled to tell me again—and again and again. He’d complained of heartburn at dinner, she said. He hadn’t gone out. She’d felt funny about it. She should have known he was really sick; except for holidays or bouts of the flu, he hadn’t stayed home a night in the last ten years. She’d been in her bedroom reading. She’d heard him get up, start down the stairs. She’d heard him call her name, then heard him fall. “He called for me,” she said as though she couldn’t quite believe it, and that was the only point in the story when she cried. She’d found him at the bottom of the stairs, had known immediately that something was wrong with him more serious than the fall.

My mother didn’t play the piano anymore. She had always taken pride in her appearance, but now she didn’t seem to care. She’d begun to look like a younger version of her mother. Her only concessions toward Christmas had been the holly wreath on the front door and the Christmas cards displayed on the mantel. I’d given her perfume, bath salts, and powder in her standard scent, and she’d given me an envelope with a check in it. “I know it isn’t much, honey, but I just couldn’t shop this year.” I hadn’t been able to think of a damn thing to give my father. Finally, in despair, I’d bought him a new lighter. He seemed to like it. He practiced with it, lighting it over and over with his left hand, scaring my mother who was sure he was going to set the bedclothes on fire.

• • •

COHEN AND Revington had gone to New York, and I felt like the worst kind of fool for not going with them. Cohen had said, “Chanukah’s not a big deal for us,” and Revington thought he’d more than done his seasonal duty. He’d been home for Christmas dinner, hadn’t he? He’d given everyone in his family a present, hadn’t he? “It’s nothing but the hair and nails growing from the corpse of Christianity anyway,” he’d said. “Come on, ace, let’s get the fuck out of here.” He had friends in Greenwich Village where we could stay. It’d give me a chance to try marijuana, which he called “tea.” We’d have a blast, and after New Year’s we could deliver Cohen to Harvard and then he’d drive me back down to Morgantown. Every instinct in me had told me to go, and I’d been just at the point of going, but somehow, at the last minute, I hadn’t gone. I couldn’t desert my mother so soon after my dad’s stroke, I’d told them, and besides I had a paper to write. Within hours of their leaving, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. Without Cohen and Revington in town, Raysburg felt truly desolate.

I kept trying to force myself to work on the paper. “A Theory of Perception Implicit in Wordsworth’s Poetry” was a topic I’d chosen myself, but now I realized that I didn’t know enough, and didn’t want to know enough, to do it justice. My schoolbooks and notes remained arranged neatly on my desk, unused, while I lay on my bed leafing through Seventeen and Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. They were to me, as I knew perfectly well, exactly what Playboy was to a fraternity boy. Down the hall the TV was talking quietly in my father’s room; I could smell my mother’s cooking— one of her bland, unseasoned spaghettis—and, in a sudden twist of disgusting insight, I saw myself as the same wretched little boy I’d always been. It used to be Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction and plastic ray guns; now it was folk music and Zen Buddhism and pretending I could read Rilke in the original, but what, after all, was the difference? At fourteen I’d sat here, on this same damned bed, poring over weight-height charts for teenage girls and painting my nails with clear polish, but now I was twenty, and yes, things had certainly changed. I no longer had to sneak into the library to stare at the pretty girls in Seventeen; now I could buy my own copy and bring it home with me. And here I was stuck in my childhood bedroom at Christmas with my fashion magazines and my own appalling mind, and there was simply no exit. Sartre’s hell at least had a certain bleak dignity to it; mine had none at all. Mine was a sick kitschy childish hell painted by Norman Rockwell.

I lit a cigarette and stepped out onto my little balcony that overlooked Front Street. Poisonous white snow was sifting down in the streetlights. I thought of all the times I’d stood in exactly that spot feeling bored or restless or confused or sad or just obscurely miserable and wondered how many million more times I would stand there feeling just as bad or worse. I apologized to my mother for missing dinner, grabbed my guitar, borrowed the car, and took off.

• • •

I DROVE to the highest point above the city—the historical marker on Highlight Road—and parked. Below me I could see the lights of Raysburg and the olive drab curve of the river catching the last of the murky sunset. The industrial haze smeared the view into soft focus like Vaseline on a camera lens. I rolled down the car window to feel the chill and for one mad moment saw myself driving away—that’s right, if I went like a bat out of hell, I could make New York by dawn. The thought of it felt as electric as a kick of adrenaline: yes, moving—up the winding road through Halleys Rise, through broad fat Pennsylvania with its sleeping farmhouses, leaving the sorry Ohio Valley behind, outrunning the last of Christmas, catching up with Revington and Cohen in Greenwich Village. But by the end of my cigarette, I was back down to earth. I didn’t even have the money for gas. And I finally admitted to myself the real reason I was stuck in Raysburg. Girls.

I had written to Natalie the last week in November—a short letter nothing like the one I’d started in my notebook. I’d read her answer so many times I’d practically memorized it:

Hi, John—

Don’t feel bad about not writing. I hate writing letters too!!! College is so much harder than high school, why didn’t anybody tell me? I wasn’t sure I liked it here but now I think I do. Boy have I learned a lot of math! My roommates are really nice. I went ice skating & thought of you. I don’t get to play the guitar as much as I want to. I saw Joan Baez!!! Dad is picking me up on Dec. 16. We’ll be coming back here on Jan. 6. In between I’ll be at home. Yes, come down any time. I’d love to see you.

Your pal, Nat

I didn’t want to go back to Morgantown too early (to my claustrophobic apartment and a deserted campus) even to see my pal, Nat, and so I was left with my other compelling reason for not going to New York. As I’d done hundreds of times before, I walked in without knocking and set my guitar case down in the hallway. There was another guitar case there ahead of mine. I followed the sound of voices into the dining room. They were finishing dinner. Dr. Markapolous gave me his usual wave and a yell: “Come on, John. Always something left for you.”

Sitting at the head of the table was David Anderson. Just what I need, I thought: the guy who dated Linda after we split up, the guy who took Cassy to his senior prom and, the last I’d heard, was still in love with her. Cassandra and I had time to exchange a quick meeting of eyes before David rose to take my hand. He still looked too good to be true—this tall, blonde, obviously fit, genuinely pleasant out-the-Pike boy. His grip was the old give-’em-hell masculinity ritual of the locker room. “Well, bless my soul,” he said, “John Dupre. It’s been too long.”

“Yeah, it has,” I said. “How are you, David?”

“Just great. Never been better. How about you? Still running?”

“Only in my mind.” I was wondering how quickly I could get out of that house without looking ridiculous. But Cassandra, with an explicit grey stare, was already passing me a plate with turkey casserole on it; her mother was already asking me how my father was doing. And the good doctor was taking up the conversation where I must have interrupted it: nuclear testing was criminal, insane. But the country has to be strong, David argued back; we have to have a deterrent. “Where’d he come from?” I said to Cassandra under my breath.

She didn’t answer, but mimed exasperation, eyes cast at the ceiling. Zoë, on my other side, answered me in a whisper: “He’s been here all day.” Then, focusing the full intensity of her exquisite blue eyes on me, she said, “Oh, I love Christmas. Don’t you, John? It’s so exciting. I never want it to end.” I gave up. Despite David Anderson, I knew I’d stay till the drinks ran out.

Doctor Markapolous lit his pipe, pushed back his chair. I could see him expanding, see what he was seeing: a couple hours of delicious argument, every opinion welcome, and the devil take the hindmost. “What do you think, John? Should we test those damn bombs?” I’d been here before; I’d be here again. It was all too familiar, all too cheerful, like that most idiotic of Christmas tunes: “always merry and bright.” I hadn’t known before just how sad I was, how deep it went, down to the bone where nothing could touch it.

The front door opened and closed—another regular visitor who didn’t have to knock. “In time for coffee,” the doctor yelled. It was George Murray, Cassy’s on-again, off-again high-school boyfriend. He saw David Anderson first, then me. He stopped just outside the dining room archway with misery written all over his face.

“Oh good grief!” Cassandra whispered.

“I didn’t know you had company,” he said to her.

“I don’t have company. People just seem to appear out of nowhere.”

“Perhaps we could take our coffee in the living room,” Cassandra’s mother said.

I passed up the coffee, instead poured myself a glass of Cassy’s mom’s famous eggnog. Everyone filed dutifully into the living room and sat down as though a play was about to begin. The tension in the room couldn’t have been any higher if George had brought with him, instead of his banjo, a live cobra. Clearly some repellent blunder was in the works.

Only the doctor appeared to be at ease; he stretched out in his vast leather recliner and kept right on going: “The problem with Kennedy is that the left has nowhere else to go, and he knows it. He still looks like a liberal and talks like a liberal, but he’s been swinging right ever since he hit the White House.”

Cassandra had arranged herself in the center of the couch with one knee drawn up, the other leg extended, as though she’d chosen intentionally to put herself on display. George and David flanked her like two dummies. This mathematical game of permutations and combinations had paired me with Zoë; we were sitting on two chairs, side by side, back in a corner where we could watch the show. Grinning, the doctor kept hammering away at David. “The Bay of Pigs. Now would you call that a model of international diplomacy?”

David knew he had to stay in the game. It must have felt to him like nothing more than a hard tennis match; he couldn’t keep the laughter out of his voice. “Come on, Doctor, how can you possibly say that? Be serious. Can we really tolerate a Russian satellite down there? What about the missile crisis?” But George didn’t look amused in the least. He wasn’t saying a word. I knew the doctor would get to him in a moment.

Out of the line of fire, I tuned out the voices, tried to locate myself in the social geography. The three women were as dressed up as if they were going out later to sip champagne at the country club. George and David were both wearing suits. They’d taken their jackets off but left their vests on; it was probably some young men’s fashion trend that had passed me right on by. “What’s going on?” I asked Zoë.

She glanced around to make sure no one was paying any attention to her, then said quickly, “David gave Cassy his fraternity pin.”

“Oh?” I felt a rush of anger at Cassandra. What kind of game was she playing?

“George probably figured out that David was here. That’s why he came over.”

“How would he have figured that out?”

“I heard Cassy tell him on the phone it wasn’t a good night to come over. But he came over anyway. He knows about David. Everybody knows about David. He just had to put two and two together.”

Right, Zoë, I thought, and you’re pretty good at that yourself. And George obviously could see nothing funny in the situation; he was snapping back at Cassy’s father. “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”

“Oh, good God!” the doctor roared at him. “Is that the kind of sententious crap they’re teaching at Canden High these days?” I could see that he knew exactly what was going on too. There were certain disadvantages to having a father that observant; after everyone went home, he’d probably tease Cassandra half to death. Yes, it was an amusing situation, but I wasn’t amused any more than George was.

Cassandra did look stunning. She’d recently begun to try out her own version of the French street urchin look that Jeanne Moreau had created in Jules et Jim. It was an image for New York, not Raysburg, but it did suit her. She was handy with a sewing machine, and she must have made the tweed jerkin and knickerbockers herself; no store in Raysburg or even Pittsburgh would have been selling anything that stylish and extreme. She wore black tights with the outfit, lace-up shoes sleek and flat as dance slippers, white lipstick, and feathery black mascara with the mandatory zombie-pale makeup. I felt (not for the first time) that I was gifted with a mysterious prescience about fashion. Cassandra had adopted an image much like the one I’d imagined for Natalie in her pedal pushers: she looked like a beautiful boy who wanted to dress like a girl but could only allow himself to go part way. A visual pun, I thought—a girl looking like a boy looking like a girl, on forever, receding down a hall of mirrors— and I was sure that no one in the room could appreciate it as much as I could.

Zoë, on the other hand, did not look even remotely like a boy. She’d inherited a style her sister had already discarded; in fact, both the blue full-skirted dress and the matching heels were Cassandra’s. With her hair teased and her lips painted shocking pink, Zoë was radiating her nascent sexuality with as much agitation as the gas in a neon tube.

“Come on boys,” Doctor Markapolous was saying, “there’re enough instruments in this house for a whole string band. Let’s have some music.”

George looked relieved. He was off the hook. He began to unpack his banjo. Music was fine with me too; I could hide behind a guitar even more effectively than I could sitting far back in a corner. But I’d be damned if I’d go first.

George and David sang “Five Hundred Miles.” I didn’t join them. They were both playing quite well and had learned to sing in sweet innocuous Peter and Paul voices with Cassandra making a pretty good Mary above them, but I knew I’d get them when my turn came. This is not what folk music should be, I thought, this watered-down mellifluous crap crooned by earnest young men in vests. It should be raw and fierce and mean something.

When my turn came, I chose a Scots ballad, one that had struck me to the heart. Above the drive of my steel strings, I gave it my most rough-edged authentic voice:

I am a rover, and that’s well known.
I am bound for to leave my home.
Leaving my friends and my dear to mourn.
My bonnie lass for me don’t mourn.

I didn’t know why the thought of leaving girls behind, leaving a home behind, should feel both so tragic and so satisfying, but it did (my West Virginia boy’s version of the Great Renunciation). I did know that I could never be like David or George, could never follow such safe paths. Yes, one of these days I would be gone—and, of course, it wasn’t that simple. After the journey, you have to come back, as Cohen always said, “like the sage down from the mountains,” and then what? Could I ever live an ordinary life and not be trapped by it? What were X people supposed to do? So these lines were for Cassandra. I loaded them with meaning—double, triple, quadruple meaning. I saw by her eyes that she got every level.

Am I bound or am I free?
Am I bound for to marry thee?

That was all I had to say to her in this song. When I sang the next verse to Zoë, I didn’t mean anything by it. I had to sing to somebody, and she was a beautiful young girl.

I took the pen for to write a song.
I wrote it broad and I wrote it long.
At every line I cried, “My dear!”
At every word I shed a tear.

I knew immediately that I shouldn’t have done it. I saw a shock pass through her, a shiver down her back. I felt an ugly sensation as though my heart had suddenly decided to pound its way through my rib cage. I hated to sing to no one at all, to a blank spot on the wall, but that’s what I did, contracting back into myself. On sheer force of habit I got through to the end, struck the last chord and let it ring.

“Hey, all right,” David said. “Great to hear you sing again. The original funky voice. Do something else.”

“Where’d you find that one?” George was asking me. “Is it a Child ballad?”

I’d gone too far, but I didn’t know exactly how or what to do about it. I thought of singing “pretty little Susie just half grown, jumps on a man like a dog on a bone,” maybe even changing “Susie” into “Zoë.” That would have brought things back to normal, made everyone laugh, but it would have been cruel, and I couldn’t do it.

“You guys sing something,” I said. “I need a drink.” What I really wanted was to get the hell out of there, but I laid my guitar back into its case and walked into the kitchen. I didn’t look at either Cassandra or Zoë.

I never got stage fright; singing in public always made me feel keyed-up and alive, but now I seemed to be frightened of something, although I couldn’t imagine what it might be. I was sweating as badly as if it had been the steamiest night of the summer. I was even a bit dizzy—a nasty buzz at the base of my neck. I jerked open the fridge and reached for a beer. I heard Zoë’s heels on the linoleum, turned around and met her eyes; they were so blue the word itself wasn’t blue enough.

She was trembling. For a moment, neither of us spoke.

“Do you know where you are, John?” she said.

I shook my head. That was the one thing I certainly didn’t know. I honestly expected her to tell me. “Under the mistletoe,” she said.

I looked up and saw it thumbtacked to the ceiling directly in front of the refrigerator door: that ancient pagan symbol. Then Zoë and I were kissing. Not in fun or even affection, but openmouthed and hungry. We were hanging onto each other like the only survivors of a disaster.

“Zo,” Cassandra said. Her voice was low but penetrating. She had stopped just inside the kitchen door with a tray of empty coffee cups in her hands. “Mom’s coming.”

Zoë stepped back, unbalanced in her big sister’s heels. She caught herself on the kitchen counter. I picked up the beer bottle. Mrs. Markapolous followed Cassandra into the kitchen. She was talking, but I couldn’t manage to turn her words into anything that made sense. Cassandra had me by the elbow. She was aiming me away from her mother. She was saying something about somebody-or-other’s last record. I couldn’t get it clear. But her one whispered sentence cut through the fog in my mind: “Get that lipstick off your face.”

In the bathroom mirror I saw a young man I knew slightly. He looked badly frightened, and his mouth was stained with a sloppy smear of brilliant pink. I washed my face, sat on the floor with my head between my knees. Somebody was knocking at the door. I knew it had to be Cassandra. She walked in before I could say anything. “Get up, John. We’re going to the corner for more beer.” I pushed myself to my feet. “Good grief! Hurry up. We’ve got to get out of the house before George and David see us.”

She caught my hand, dragged me down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door. She didn’t even let me stop to get my coat. The coldness of the night instantly brought me back to the ordinary world. My teeth began to chatter. “She’s in the eighth grade, you ass!” Cassandra said. She’d reined her voice in, hard, but it was fighting back.

We stopped under a streetlight and stared at each other. I’d always suspected that she was capable of fury, but I’d never expected anything quite like this. She didn’t explode; she controlled it, fired at me in short bursts. “Thirteen . . . You ass, she’s thirteen . . . She’s not thirteen going on fourteen . . . She turned thirteen in August.”

“I know she’s thirteen. I’m sorry. I’m drunk.” Although I wasn’t.

“I don’t give a damn if you are drunk. Now listen to me, John Dupre. This time you’re not going to get away with it. It was bad enough with me. Dad and Mom fought about it the whole time. She thought it was terrible. He kept saying I was old enough to know what I was doing. But Zoë . . . John, she’s just a little kid. You were eighteen, and I was fourteen. But now you’re twenty. Twenty! And Dad always let me do what I wanted anyway, but Zoë . . . He doesn’t trust Zoë to blow her own nose.” I laughed.

“It’s not funny. If Mom had caught you . . . Good grief, do you have any idea what she can be like? You wouldn’t be allowed in our house again. Zoë’d be grounded for a year. Even Dad wouldn’t think it was funny, and he thinks everything’s funny. I don’t give a damn what you do, but . . .”

“Oh, don’t you?”

“You can make love to her in the middle of the kitchen floor for all I care . . . But she’s playing, and I don’t know what you’re doing. What the hell are you doing?”

“What are you doing with George and David?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I don’t know what I’m playing. But you’re playing too.”

I’d stopped her. We looked at each other. “What was I supposed to do?” The anger was gone from her voice. “David gave me his fraternity pin.”

“Why did you take it?”

“I don’t know why I took it. He says he’s in love with me.”

“Are you in love with him?”

She was firing at me again. “Yes, I’m in love with him. Damn it, it’s none of your business. Boy, am I mad! Just do me a favor, will you? Just one favor. Stop playing junior philosopher. Grow up, damn it. Stop lusting after little girls. Is that what I was for you? Just another little girl? Is that all I meant to you? Well, I don’t know if I’ve grown up yet, but if I haven’t, I never will. I’m sixteen. Maybe that’s not supposed to be an adult, but I feel like an adult. I have adult feelings. I love David, and it’s none of your goddamned business what I do. Stop faking, John. Be real. Leave Zoë alone. Leave your goddamned Buddhism alone. You’re a fraud. Stop being such a phony. Oh, Goddamn it.”

I’d never seen Cassandra cry before, and it would be years before I would see her cry again. “Cassy,” I said and tried to put my hand on her arm.

“Don’t touch me.”

I didn’t say a word. I waited.

“Of course I don’t love him,” she said, “but what was I supposed to do?”

“You could have said, ‘Thanks, David, but no thanks.’ If I’m a fraud, Cassandra, so are you. What are you doing with your Vogue outfit and your white lipstick? What are you doing playing around with those guys?”

“What were you doing with your tongue down Zoë’s throat?”

“I don’t know, and that’s the honest to God truth. We were under the mistletoe . . .”

“Sure. And now she’s flattered to death. And she’s got a great story to tell all her little friends. And that’s all. That goddamn well better be all.”

“That’s all. Believe me, that’s all. But just between the two of us, two X people out here on a street corner . . . with me freezing to death . . . tell me what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing. David says he loves me. George says he loves me . . .”

“I love you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

• • •

IT WAS not late when I got home, at least not late for me, but my mother had already shut the house down. I slipped off my boots and padded into the kitchen. While I’d been gone, she’d made ginger cookies. I drank milk and ate at least a dozen of the damned things until I felt a disgusting pudding-thick lump in my stomach. I wasn’t ready to face my childhood bedroom so I sat in the bay window where there wasn’t any Christmas tree. I’d been right: the sadness in me was so deep that nothing could touch it, and I couldn’t even dream up a plausible distraction. It wasn’t as though I had no friends in Raysburg—I knew every bar in town where my old buddies from the Academy hung out—but as for finding somebody I could talk to, as Cohen would have said, “at the level of soul,” I seemed to have run out. Cassandra was so furious with me I wasn’t sure she’d ever speak to me again.

Why had I allowed myself to kiss Zoë like that? It had felt like something entirely outside my conscious volition. A sense of balance, proportion, must have slipped away from me while my attention had been elsewhere. I went over the events—the chain of causality—and each step was innocuous right up to the moment of the kiss itself, and then? What was I supposed to do, look into her eyes and recite: “Equally empty, equally awake, equally a coming Buddha?”

The enormity of what I’d done was finally hitting me: kissing Zoë was not the point; Cassandra was the point. I was sick with regret. I went over everything we’d said to each other, and I couldn’t find any way to fix things.

• • •

I SAT there for a good hour so miserable I couldn’t move—not even enough to light a cigarette—and then I became aware that I was looking at, had been looking at for some time, the old-fashioned roll-top desk in the corner of the living room. My mother stuffed everything in the world into that thing: documents like birth certificates and report cards, newspaper clippings, letters from relatives, souvenir menus, the best of my grade-school artwork, and old photographs, the ones that had not merited inclusion in any of the family albums. I began going through the desk methodically, taking my time. My mother, I discovered, had imposed her own screwy order on this junk, and I found in the back of the left-hand bottom drawer all of the earliest photographs with me in them.

There it was: the glossy black-and-white eight-by-ten of the Jefferson Second Grade Class, 1949–50. I was a skinny little boy in the front row, wearing a solemn expression and a plaid shirt, looking as though he’d been systematically starved. (According to my mother, I’d been the world’s pickiest eater.) And I hadn’t invented her, nor had my memory falsified her in the least; she was standing right next to me: Nancy Clark. She really was a very pretty little girl. She really did have Shirley Temple curls. She really was wearing a party dress with a short full skirt and classic little-girl white socks with black patent Mary Janes. And yes, right there in front of God and everybody, caught and preserved on film for posterity—I didn’t even have to strain to see it—we were holding hands.

I set the picture aside to take back to Morgantown with me. Nancy was my age, so she’d be twenty now. I wondered where she was, what she was doing, what kind of girl she’d turned out to be. It’d be easy enough to find out. The old-time residents of the Island seldom moved; her parents were probably in the phone book. And then I closed my eyes and tried to remember her. I had an image in my mind as clear as a film clip: Nancy on a stage, tap dancing. Of the two of us together, all that came readily back was the warmth of her hand in mine and the tickly sensation of her breath in my ear as she whispered something. I couldn’t remember anything we’d done together beyond walking around the school yard holding hands and announcing to our teacher that we were going to get married someday—but then there was something more, something floating just beyond the edge of conscious memory, and the feeling of it, bitter-sweet and infinitely precious. All these years I’d been wrong to think that Linda Edmonds had been my first love.

I kept on digging through the drawer until I found the other photograph I was looking for, and there was only one. Back in those days film was expensive, processing was expensive, so if you wanted a picture of something, that’s exactly what you took: a picture. Seeing it was a shock. I hadn’t remembered it clearly: Halloween, 1949. Did I look expectant, excited, nervous, apprehensive? No. Did I look pleased with myself as though I’d just put something over on the adult world? No. My faced showed not much of anything, or at any rate no strong emotion. I’d been sure that I’d struck a girlish pose, or tried to, a curtsey or something like that, but again, no. I hadn’t been playing to the dress at all; I’d just stood there in it. I looked like an ordinary seven-year-old girl dressed up as Alice in Wonderland, showing just the first hint of impatience as her mother fumbles with the old box camera.

A voice in my mind was telling me, as it usually did, that I didn’t need to think about any of that stuff. It was years ago, lost in my childhood. It didn’t have anything to do with me now. But of course it did. Sometimes when I was looking through Seventeen, I did imagine making love to those lovely, iconic, beautiful young women, but at other times I imagined that I was one of them.

• • •

I WAS so agitated that all I could think to do was walk endlessly in circles around the Island just as I had so many times before—but I didn’t want to do that. Maybe there was some way out. It wasn’t even midnight yet. Natalie wouldn’t be in bed. I still remembered her number. I was reaching for the phone when I had second thoughts. When you’re in your first year of college and you come home for Christmas, your old high-school buddies are really important to you. She was probably out somewhere with “the gang.” And when we’d been dating, I’d never brought her home this early. If I called now, the person I’d most likely get was Natalie’s mother, dead drunk.

OK, I didn’t need to talk to Natalie. I was definitely going to see her, and I could take off for Morgantown any time I wanted, maybe even tomorrow, but, in the meantime, I needed some way to make it through the night, someone to talk to right now— someone whose mind might be just as hopelessly complex, convoluted, and bizarre as mine.

I called information and got the number for the only Rabinowitz in Huntington. If I heard anybody else’s voice but Carol’s, I was going to hang up, but she answered on the second ring. “Hi,” I said, “it’s me.”

“John! Of course it’s you. You’re the only person I know who’d call me at this hour.”

“I’m sorry. Is it too late?”

“Oh, no. I’m glad you called. I’m bored silly. How are you?”

“I’m OK . . . Well, no, I’m not. I’m having a lousy time.”

“I’m sorry. Is your father worse?”

“No, no, it’s not that. It’s . . . you know, everything. His stroke. Being home. The whole damn works.”

It made me absurdly happy to hear her voice. It was exactly what I needed: a reminder that there was another world outside the sickening circles of my own mind. We compared notes on how hard it was to be immersed, once again, in the problematical bosoms of our families, on how boring and oppressive and downright stupid our hometowns were. She told me that she’d seen a bit of her old boyfriend Stephen. “How was that?” I asked her.

“Oh, painful. But I think I had to do it . . . so I’d know it was really over. I feel free now. All that morbid brooding, all the what-ifs and maybes . . . I think I’m free of all that now.”

I didn’t believe her. “That’s good,” I said.

“How’s your little schoolgirl?” she asked me.

Little schoolgirl was so far from how I thought of Cassandra, it took me a moment to get it. “Oh. Cassy. She’s the queen of the hop. She’s doing just fine.”

“But not fine with you?”

I couldn’t understand how she could have picked that up from my voice, and for a moment I was so annoyed I couldn’t answer. “Well, no,” I said.

“That’s too bad . . . Look, John, I’m bored and you’re bored, and I’ve missed you. Why don’t you come down?”

“Do you mean it?”

“Of course I mean it. It’d be great to see you. We could cheer each other up. Dan’s gone back to New York, so we have a spare bedroom, and I’ve had boys here before . . . It’s no big deal. And you’d get to see my mother throw the world’s most ostentatious New Year’s Eve party.”

Tomorrow night was New Year’s Eve. I’d forgotten all about it. “I’d love to,” I said, “are you sure . . .?”

“When can I expect you?” she said, laughing.

“I’ll hitchhike. It’ll take me as long as it takes.”

“Oh, isn’t this fun! I’m really looking forward to seeing you. Oh, and John . . . you do own a suit and tie, don’t you?”