Ludmilla is wearing a purple dress which leaves most of her back exposed. I trace the letters L...O...V...E... on her back, but she fails to respond. She’s not to be trifled with. Love, I ruminate, has become altogether dispensable. I broach her first meeting with Victor.

That fall, Sam and Sandy had a third date and a fourth. They talked without stopping, drove around town, ate sushi and pad thai and barbequed ribs. At the end of each date, Sam walked Sandy to her 

“American women are like beautiful manor houses with lavish artwork and spacious rooms. But the lights are always out. Americans are not born; they are manufactured. Ford-ersatz, Chrysler-ersatz

“Oh yes, Valerie will like it very much,” said the energetic young man with blue-black hair and a sharply cleft chin, in an accent that was vaguely ‘English’. He and Jacob Eisenman were standing in the large shabby room that overlooked the crashing Pacific, on Kauai, one of Hawaii’s outermost and least populated islands.

Tall and too thin, sometimes stooped but now bent bravely forward into the wind, old Duncan Elliott heads southward in Central Park, down a steep and cindery path—

In fact there were two boys born that night. Jesus was first long awaited, expected. His twin brother was a surprise. The angels ignored him. His mother was disconcerted b this squalling irascible utter! 

There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky, because it’s such a mean thing to do.

In summer, our neighborhood quiets in phases. The quieting begins in May. Schools give their older kids, the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, a month off to prepare for the baccalaureate exams. Following a ritual as old as our parents, the students retreat to residences out of town, to peaceful chalets and cabins away from civilization for communal study and living. As noisily as migrating birds, they return for the state exams in June. Then school ends for the year; a couple of families travel abroad, a few more leave for the mountains. An outsider doesn’t perceive the slow but sure change in the neighborhood’s population until Beirut broils in August.

In early July, our neighbors across the landing, the Masris, left for the mountains. They wouldn’t return from their summer home till late September with its cooling temperatures. That was the summer I was promoted to the apartment’s caretaker, taking over from my brother. My father insisted that I look after the Masri home because he thought that at thirteen, I wasn’t yet behaving as an adult should. I needed to become more responsible. I’d been receiving talking-tos, lectures with full arm waving and hand gestures, every day for a month.

“Enter,” she says, and is obeyed.

He loved the opera. He hated the opera. So when his mother insisted that he take the cherished single ticket to Verdi’s Falstaff (she listened so often to the La Scala recording that he suspected she’d memorized the score), Arno responded with a formal “As you wish, mother,”