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folded behind him like Rommel inspecting tanks—then settled (surprisingly) on the plumpest one, a girl of maybe sixteen or seventeen years with a full bust and scullery-maid shoulders. She rose from her chair and strolled into the

adjoining room. Jack gave me a single glance, then followed her inside.

Sitting there with all those girls, I remember being quite

grateful for the masculine accent of my bowler hat and for

the way it concealed my lap. A minute passed, five. As I felt

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the soft hammering of my heart spreading out to my skin, I

began to wonder if I was very slowly dying, and I wondered, too, what Jack would do with my body and who would notify Mother and how would they phrase it and would

they bury me next to Father. Questions of the most morbid

intensity, so it was a great relief to see Jack amble out of that room, as whole as when he walked in, and it was in this spirit that I rose and shouted: “That was fast!”

His face reddened as though it had been slapped.

“Your turn, asshole,” he muttered. And shoved me inside.

The first surprise was that the girl was not in bed but

standing by the window. The second was that she was still

half clothed, in a cup bra and high-waisted bloomers. I

stood there smiling cretinously in a wash of fuchsia light.

Probably I made some joke or commented on the weather.

Her response was to come away from the window and seat

herself rather heavily on the mattress. With a sense of obligation, I joined her there, taking care to keep a forearm’s width of space between us. I could see that one of her bras-siere straps had slipped off her shoulder, and I guess it says something about my state of mind that I very nearly slid it back up, the way you instinctively right a painting that’s hanging off center.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Lenore.”

“Lem,” I said, though she hadn’t asked. “I always like to

come to Harlem,” I said. “My friend—the fella who was just

here, he’s—you know, he’s seriously ill. We don’t know if

he’ll make it another year, so I told him we’d come here and



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make his dreams come true, if you know what I’m getting at.

Because we don’t . . .” Hadn’t I said this? “We don’t know if he’ll live another year. But I said I’d be there for him because that’s what a best pal does.”

In memory, the monologue swirls between truth and

fancy and settles into a kind of halftime pep talk. Lenore

was unroused.

“What I’m driving at,” I told her, “is that I really don’t

need anything. I’m squared away myself. In that department. So maybe we could just sit here for a few minutes, if that suits you.”

My nostrils picked out the faintest thread of rose water

amid the tobacco. My ears picked out the sine curve of police sirens.

“Okey-doke,” she said.

Her voice was more girlish than I expected, and after a

stretch of silence, she actually began to hum, very softly. I couldn’t have told you what the tune was—medieval plain-chant, for all I know—but to my ears, she was somehow describing, in musical terms, what had just happened in this room. And with that, the thing I couldn’t imagine was all I could see. Lenore pressed against the wall. Jack driving in, groans spilling from his narrow chest, eyes clouded, neck arching. My hand, under cover of my bowler, crept toward

my zipper, and one thing led to another, and then, just like that, it was done. A palmful of spunk. I wiped myself clean with my handkerchief and said thank you to Lenore and fixed a grin on my face and strode out of the room. “Strike another one off the list,” I called.

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I wish I could say Jack and I floated back to Choate on

clouds of priapic glory, but neither of us had brought rub—

bers, and Jack got into a terrible panic and insisted we grab every cream and lotion the hospital pharmacy had in stock.

He tracked down some terrifying miniature whisk that you

stuck down your Johnson to clean it out. One night, he even rang up his family physician—this would have been one or two in the morning—to describe the exact condition of his

willy. “See, Doctor, there’s a broken blood vessel in the—I think you call it the glans? I really can’t say how it got there, I just noticed it in the shower . . .”

So this was not a story to be shared with a girlfriend, but I do sometimes wish Jackie— my Jackie—could have seen that Jack. Not a conquistador, I promise you. Just another scared kid.

There was something else I didn’t bring up with her

because I knew he wouldn’t want me to. What I’d said to

that Harlem girl was true. Jack, for as long as I’d known

him, was dying.

Or at least felt himself to be. He’d barely made it past the scarlet fever at three, and he caught just about every childhood germ or virus a body could. At Choate, I once saw him faint dead away at chapel, and I was there the next day when they carted him off to New Haven Hospital. A wasting disease, we were told. The whole school was instructed to pray for him. Even I, hellbound Christian, got down