"You're the second person I've heard say that this afternoon."

"Must have been on the radio. Some kind of giveaway."

The doctor stopped by my gurney with his clipboard.

"We're ready to release you," he said.

"So, everything's fine?"

"I didn't say that," said the doctor. "I said we were ready to release you."

That gangrenous wino from Utica was correct. She was not my mommy. My mommy was here in Nearmont, in her living room, sipping peppermint tea.

"When I was young," she said now, "single, working in the city, that was something. Something hideous. But wonderful. I did things that would make your hair curl. The hair on your palms."

"Mom," I said.

We had to shout a bit above the loud, lunging minor chords Francine banged out on her organ. This recital, according to Claudia, was the new post-prandial routine. Francine claimed to have studied at a conservatory in Indiana, though all she ever played was this piece of her own composition, a meandering dirgey thing with sudden surges of dark joy. Francine's performance varied, my mother said, with the quality of her stash.

"Very nice, Francie! Fortissimo!"

"Fortissimo," I said. "You don't know anything about music."

"Fake it until you make it. Now where was I?"

"You were about to inflict me with the details of your youthful peccadilloes."

"Peccadilloes? What are you, an old society dame? You kids today are so uptight."

"I'm almost forty, Mom."

"You must change your life."

"Don't give me your hippy crap."

"That's Rilke."

"Rilke's a hippy."

"I'm not. The fifties were the sixties. For the people who mattered. Not that I mattered. But I wanted to."

"And what were the sixties?"

"Boring. Of course, by the good part I was stuck out here."

"With me."

"Don't sulk. You were an infant. It's not your fault you weren't stimulating."

"Weren't you happy just being a mother?"

"I was happy being a mother. Take out the 'just.' "

"Well, you're still in the suburbs, and I'm long gone, so I can't take all the blame."

"When did you ever take blame? You give blame. To me."

"We're not doing that tonight."

"Right, I forgot. The suburbs are the new bohemia, anyway."

"Judging by what we're hearing right now, you could be right."

"Don't worry, I'm right. Fortissimo!"

Later I sat on the patio with a beer and a one-hitter I'd found in Francine's sewing box. I kept calling Purdy. I kept calling Maura. I even called Don. Nobody was home, or near a phone, or answering. I sat out on the patio in a rubber-ribbed chair with the phone in one hand and the one-hitter and a lighter in the other and the beer like a throttle between my legs, and it seemed for a brief moment that I might be the pilot of something, something sleek and meaningful, but I was not the pilot of anything. The night was warm, the night sky blue, gluey. I could smell the neighbor's fresh-mown lawn. New Jersey was a fresh-mown tomb.

Fool, I said to myself. Depressive, raw-eyeballed pansy. Is that all you've got? That's what you had when you still lived on this street, when you were just a budding tristate artist manque. Now what are you? A botch of corpuscles. A waste of quarks. A carbon-based fuckwad. Purdy is better, Maura more right. Someday you will be a fat, grinning embarrassment to Bernie. Will you still pretend to be a painter? Will you still pretend to be a person?

"Milo?"

My mother's voice carried softly from the kitchen.

"Hey."

"Everything okay out there?"

"Sure, why?"

"I just heard this, I don't know, grumbling."

"Oh, sorry. I stubbed my toe."

"Sitting there?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, okay."

The door slid back and I stood.

"Wait!" I wailed.

It's an odd sensation to weep in your mother's lap for the first time in thirty years. It's not the same lap. It's smaller, more fragile. Bonier and tinier. I was afraid my head might hurt her lap. I was afraid her lap wouldn't help my head.

But it did. Claudia cradled me, stroked my hair, cooed: "It's all right, baby. It's all right." It was not all right, not really, but this hardly mattered. My mother was stroking my hair. My mother's lover, at the end of the sofa, kneaded my feet.

"Thanks, Francine."

"My pleasure, Milo."

Soon I was all cried out. I remembered the sensation, felt it frequently as a child, each time I was denied a toy or a chance to play with somebody else's toy or informed that another slice of pineapple pizza was not in the offing. You cried and you cried and then you really couldn't cry anymore. You got wrung, husked. It was that voluptuous emptiness you read about in old books, or old-seeming books that would use the word "voluptuous" that way, a strange, soaring, dead puppet exultation I could never quite explain. I had last felt it a few months after my father died.

Nobody had died just now. The stuff had just welled up in me, up to the eyes, as they used to say, not that I was sure anymore who "they" were.

Who's on first? Self-Pitying Twit. Third base.

More than anything it was just so very good to be stroked and kneaded by my mother and Francine. It was just so very nice to be kneaded in Nearmont. Too bad I couldn't live here with them. But I was not welcome here forever. That's what made me welcome now. I was being readied for release. I would have to drag my botched ass back into the world. Francine was Claudia's family. Bernie, and maybe Maura, was mine.

"I love you," I mumbled into my mother's jeans.

"I know that, honey."

"I'm sorry."

"What are you sorry about?"

"Me. Spidercunt. Everything."

"I forgave you a long time ago."

"And I forgive you, Mom."

"But I don't want your forgiveness, silly boy."

Francine dug lint out from under my pinky toe.

Twenty-six

Purdy's chef wore the sideburns of a Vegas legend. They poked down below his purple toque. He lurched around Purdy's enormous Tribeca kitchen with some kind of digital cleaver, shouted into a wire that fell from his ear. He cursed himself, his food, the kitchen, his crew. He castigated various assistants en route with ingredients, though I wondered how much these outbursts counted as theater for the half-dozen party guests gathered near the cutting boards.

"Leave it to a fucking Turk to forget the tarragon!" he said into his wire. "Soon as you get here I'm handing you a ticket back to Istanbul. Freight. You can go back to work in that fusion nightmare I found you in, though perhaps you'd be better off sterno-braising anchovies for the smugglers in stir, you greasy bastard."

"Must be gunning for his own show," said the man beside me, a handsome silver-haired fellow in a pink polo shirt. He had the collar of his polo shirt up. Maybe he liked it that way, or else it was some kind of comment about people who liked it that way. When it came to sartorial irony, the rich had it tough.

"A cooking show?" I said.

"A screaming show," said the man.

"I have an idea for a cooking show," I said.

"Good for you," said the man, and walked away.

A few more moments of baster-based antics and I followed the him into a space the size of a small ballroom. Purdy's parlor was a design-porn paradise. Here twinkled every chrome and leather marvel Maura had ever circled with affecting sanguinity in her catalogs, all the sofas and chaises and cabinets and floor lamps we could never afford. That was half the room. The other brimmed with mahogany bookshelves and gleaming antique credenzas and Persian rugs. One end was for high-tech pleasures, the other for reading Gibbon while getting blown in a wingback chair.