you.” I was so mad I was trembling. “I’m hanging up now.”
“No—wait. Wait. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about your mother. That’s not why I wanted to talk to you. Please. Will you wait a second?”
“I’m waiting.”
“First off—assuming you care—I’m having your dad cremated. That all right with you?”
“Do what you want.”
“You never did have much use for him, did you?”
“Is that it?”
“One more thing. I don’t care where you are, quite frankly. But I need an address where I can get in touch with you.”
“And why is that?”
“Don’t be a wise ass. At some point somebody’s going to call from your school or something—”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“—and I’m going to need, I don’t know, some kind of explanation of where you are. Unless you want the cops to put you on the side of a milk carton or something.”
“I think that’s fairly unlikely.”
“Fairly unlikely,” she repeated, in a cruel, drawling imitation of my voice. “Well, may be. But give it to me, all the same, and we’ll call it even. I mean,” she said, when I didn’t answer, “let me make it plain, it makes no difference to me where you are. I just don’t want to be left holding the bag out here in case there’s some problem and I need to get in touch with you.”
“There’s a lawyer in New York. His name’s Bracegirdle. George Bracegirdle.”
“Do you have a number?”
“Look it up,” I said. Pippa had come into the room to get the dog a bowl of water, and, awkwardly, so I wouldn’t have to look at her, I turned to face the wall.
“Brace Girdle?” Xandra was saying. “Is that the way it sounds? What the hell kind of name is that?”
“Look, I’m sure you’ll be able to find him.”
There was a silence. Then Xandra said: “You know what?”
“What?”
“That was your father that died. Your own father. And you act like it was, I don’t know, I’d say the dog, but not even the dog. Because I know you’d care if it was the dog got hit by a car, at least I think you would.”
“Let’s say I cared about him exactly as much as he did about me.”
“Well, let me tell you something. You and your dad are a whole lot more alike than you might think. You’re his kid, all right, through and through.”
“Well, you’re full of shit,” I said, after a brief, contemptuous pause—a retort that seemed, to me, to sum up the situation pretty nicely. But—long after I’d hung up the phone, when I sat sneezing and shivering in a hot bath, and in the bright fog after (swallowing the aspirins Hobie gave me, following him down the hall to the musty spare room, you look packed in, extra blankets in the trunk, no, no more talking, I’ll leave you to it now) her parting shot rang again and again in my mind, as I turned my face into the heavy, foreign-smelling pillow. It wasn’t true—no more than what she’d said about my mother was true. Even her raspy dry voice coming through the line, the memory of it, made me feel dirty. Fuck her, I thought sleepily. Forget about it. She was a million miles away. But though I was dead tired—more than dead tired—and the rickety brass bed was the softest bed I’d ever slept in, her words were an ugly thread running all night long through my dreams.
III.
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.
—FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Chapter 7.
The Shop-Behind-the-Shop
i.
WHEN I WOKE TO the clatter of garbage trucks, it was as if I’d parachuted into a different universe. My throat hurt. Lying very still under the eiderdown, I breathed the dark air of dried-out potpourri and burnt fireplace wood and—very faint—the evergreen tang of turpentine, resin, and varnish.
For some time I lay there. Popper—who’d been curled by my feet—was nowhere in evidence. I’d slept in my clothes, which were filthy. At last—propelled by a sneezing fit—I sat up, pulled my sweater over my shirt and grappled under the bed to make sure the pillowcase was still there, then trudged on cold floors to the bathroom. My hair had dried in knots too tangled to yank the comb through, and even after I doused it in water and started over, one chunk was so matted I finally gave up and sawed it out, laboriously, with a pair of rusted nail scissors from the drawer.
Christ, I thought, turning from