Ilan, who was twenty-one, regarded his dazzling greengray eyes as his greatest, most secure asset. Almost no one—including himself—could resist their allure, and for years (since the age of ten or so) he had compulsively followed a ritual of examining his face in the mirror at length, then emitting a resigned sigh, as if to reluctantly acknowledge: Can’t do anything about it—these eyes are so gorgeous they could drive a person crazy.

Outside the realm of his eyes, Ilan found things less satisfactory, and this caused him constant but silent suffering. His long, thin body seemed as though it were being stretched on either side by unequally matched powers, each struggling to pull the hardest. His vexing proportions were clearly the result of this struggle: from the waist up, his physique brought to mind a long noodle of dough that had been rolled, stretched, and thinned until his rear end had the same degree of flatness as his back, while his head and squashed face, particularly when viewed frontally, looked like the direct continuation of his neck in one straight line. His legs, on the other hand, were as short as a child’s, and the feet protruding from them were abnormally narrow, extremely long (he wore a size 12), and embarrassingly pale, or so he felt, which was why he never dared wear sandals.

After his parents divorced, Ilan had moved in with Gramsy (a nickname he had invented when he was three), who lived in a one-bedroom apartment next door to Nadia. He slept on a narrow twin bed in a closed-in balcony off the kitchen, surrounded by piles of empty boxes, broken lamp shades, and various tatters left behind by the previous tenant. (Gramsy was terrified she might return at any moment to demand her pathetic but legal belongings). There were muslin blouses from the 1940s with missing buttons and frayed seams under the arms, which had once been white but were now yellow; moth-eaten ball gowns in lavender and baby-blue chiffon with high, narrow waistlines; a faux fur stole covered with a thin layer of glue and dead bugs; pink corsets with dozens of hooks; and one black silk nightgown that had survived virtually intact apart from its completely disintegrated train, which Ilan cherished above all the other items in this legacy that he viewed as his own. He tried on the nightgown every evening, marveling at its décolletage (a word he had learned from Gramsy), which was adorned with two rows of colorful crystal stones that he affectionately called “my candy.”

Ilan was exempt from military service due to “incompatibility,” though he insisted with fearsome resoluteness—or with smug indifference, depending on his mood—that it was not he who was incompatible with the army, but rather the army that was incompatible with him. (He had once heard that line from someone, and pretended—then later forgot that he was pretending—that he had come up with it.) The issue of military service seemed to come between him and Matti, whom Ilan perceived as the embodiment of “the establishment.” Whenever their paths crossed, above every word Matti said, every “pass the Coke please, Ilan,” there hovered, in Ilan’s mind’s eye, a giant, colorful neon sign flashing the word A-R-M-Y while an imaginary siren blared. This vision aroused contractions of terror, distress, and latent anger, which gripped Ilan in the diaphragm and dysregulated his breath.

This was what he experienced as he stood in the hallway wearing Nadia’s amethyst ring on his finger and his eyes met Matti’s and encountered one of those looks—the supposedly hesitant looks that embodied a dark core of hostility, which passed through Ilan’s face, penetrated his mind, and exited out the other side of his head, transmitting a momentary tremor through his thin, weak hands. He fled to Gramsy, dabbed the saliva and apple juice off her chin with the dish towel, and kept his back to Matti (“that guy,” as he privately called him), which meant that he hardly heard Matti speaking, imbuing his voice with a firm courtesy that sounded very foreign.

“I want you all to leave, please. Leave us alone.” Matti’s words finally broke through. He took off his jacket and slung it over his arm as though preparing for a long walk.

“Which us? Us who?” asked Nadia.

“Us. Me and Margie,” Matti replied. Then he glared at the door and waited, his back turned to them. His body looked rigid and poised, as if it had been wrapped in cling film. He stood there until the final sounds and rustles attested to their departure.