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Was I happy? Who wouldn’t be? I had friends, my studies to occupy ather to inity to a girl I met at a party We were both very intoxicated, didn’t know each other at all, and though she didn’t say as much--we barely spoke, beyond the usual preliotiation over thein, too, and that her intention was si done as expeditiously as possible so that she couldencounters I suppose I felt the same When it was over, I left her room quickly, as if from the scene of a crime, and in four years I laid eyes on her only twice more, both tiht: I had foundthe charges, but an to fade froht of day Always these calls were the same First I would speak withthat she had spent teeks waiting by the phone--and then my father, whose jovial tone see edict, and finally both together I could easily iether with the receiver between them as they called out their valedictory "I love you"s and "I’ood"s, rip on the clock above the kitchen sink, watching his money drain away at thirty cents a s of tenderness in me, almost of pity, as if I were the abandoner and they the abandoned, yet I was always relieved when these calls ended, the click of the receiver releasing me back into my true existence

Before I knew it, the leaves had turned, then fallen, their desiccated carcasses everywhere underfoot, suffusing the air with a sweet s the first snow fell, land winter, damp and raw It felt like one more baptism in a year of the ho break, and Ohio was too far in any case--I’d have wasted half the time on the bus--so I accepted an invitation to spend the holiday with Lucessi in the Bronx Stupidly, I had expected a scene of Italian life straight out of Hollywood: a cra and screaarlic sweat through his undershirt and hisup her hands and wailing "Mamma mia" every thirty seconds

What I found couldn’t have been h technically the Bronx, was as tony as any neighborhood I’d ever seen, in a huge stone Tudor that looked as if it had been hijacked frohetti and meatballs here, no household shrines to the Madonna, no ar as a to dinner was served by a Guatemalan housemaid in an aproned uniform, and afterward, everybody repaired to a room they actually called "the study," to listen to a radio broadcast of Wagner’s inter cycle Lucessi had told me that his family was in "the restaurant business" (thus the pizza parlor of ination), but in fact his father was chief financial officer of the restaurant division of Goldman Sachs, to whose Wall Street offices he commuted every day in a Lincoln Continental the size of a tank I’d known that Lucessi had a younger sister; he had failed to oddess, quite possibly the ally tall, with lustrous black hair, a complexion so crea into a roo more than a slip Her na school, soinia where they rode horses all day, and when she wasn’t lounging around in her underwear, readingloudly on the phone, she was striding through the house in tall riding boots and clanking spurs and tight breeches, a costume no less powerful than the slip in its ability to send the blood duue, in other words, a fact as obvious as the weather, yet she went out of her way to re me "Tom" nodoused by cold water

My final night in Riverdale, I awoke sory I had been instructed to treat the house "as if it were hably i in my stomach I slipped on a pair of sweatpants and crept downstairs to the kitchen, where I discovered Arianna at the table in a flannel bathrobe, paging through Cos cereal into her flawlessly forallon of milk sat on the counter My first instinct was to retreat, but she had already noticedlike an idiot in the doorway