And I was at least as astonished to discover that he wasn’t. He’d knock on a few doors and go through a few interviews, but what he mostly did was make up his own answers to the questionnaire. “Because who gives a shit, right? You think anybody even looks at what we turn in? You think some genius on Madison Avenue changes an ad campaign because Mrs. Kelly at 537 Jerome Avenue thinks Yuban instant coffee smells like dirty socks?”

  Either Eddie or I was being stupid, and I kept changing my mind as to who it was. I figured he’d get fired, and he might have, sooner or later, but the instant coffee study ran its course and when it was over they let us both go. He did things his way and I did things mine, and I guess we both came out okay.

  Was it morality or fear of the consequences that kept me on the straight and narrow? Looking back, I think the chief factor may have been inertia. And what would I do with the hour or two that I saved?

  And virtue, it turned out, had unanticipated rewards. One Saturday afternoon I knocked on a door on Glebe Avenue and the woman who opened her door for me went on to offer me a cup of coffee. (That wasn’t unusual, given the subject of my questionnaire.) As usual I declined, I wouldn’t develop a taste for coffee for another couple of years, so she suggested a Coke or a beer. I said yes to the beer, and she contrived to bump into me on her way to the kitchen, and again on the way back, and you can see where this is going. I couldn’t, not at first, but I caught on soon enough, and it took me longer than usual to finish that day’s shift.

  Her name was Shirley Rasmussen, and she said she was thirty-five, which seemed very old to me. Looking back, I think she was probably closer to forty. She was married, and if she ever told me her husband’s name I’ve long since forgotten it. He was out for the afternoon, he’d taken both their kids to the Knicks game and hadn’t even asked her to come along, not that she would have. Basketball wasn’t her game.

  We played her game in their bedroom, with a crucifix on one wall and the Sacred Heart of Jesus on another. If I’d been Catholic that might have given me pause, but probably not; all I knew was I was actually going to get laid, and I didn’t have room in my mind for anything else.

  I suppose nowadays people would label her behavior as child molestation. I was seventeen, a young seventeen, and she was more than twice my age. A lot of people would contend that she took advantage of me.

  And, you know, if you were to reverse the genders, if you make Shirley a forty-year-old man having his way with a seventeen-year-old girl, I’d join in that judgment. I know that’s inconsistent, that sauce for a goose is equally sauce for a gander, but it seems categorically different to me.

  I saw her four more times after that, spread over two months or so. Always around one o’clock on a weekday afternoon, while her husband was at work and before her kids got out of school. I’d invent a medical appointment and leave school early.

  She wasn’t beautiful, and I suppose both her face and figure were past their prime, but she was still an attractive woman, and her sexual energy and enthusiasm were a big part of the draw. I don’t suppose she was sexually more knowledgeable than most women of her age and in her circumstances, but if you’d shown me a copy of the Kama Sutra I’d have assumed she wrote it. She knew what she liked and she knew what she wanted and she wasn’t shy about letting me know.

  Just that first Saturday, and then four weekday afternoons. On the last of these she said we’d had a lot of fun, but now it was time to stop. “Before either of us likes the other too much,” she said. I said something awkward, maybe that I already liked her a whole lot, and she said that was all the more reason to call it quits. But first there was one more thing we’d never tried . . .

  Afterward, on my way home, I felt the disappointment one would expect, but I was surprised to find I also felt a measure of relief. It was the sort of thing that had to end, and it might very easily have ended badly in any number of ways, and instead it had come to a very satisfactory conclusion, leaving me with new knowledge and experience and nothing but pleasant memories.

  And by the time I got home I found myself thinking about one of the girls in my English class. It took me a few days to work up the courage, but I pictured myself in front of a door with her name on it, and I went ahead and knocked. Would she like to go to a movie? Sure, she said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Did I ever tell anybody about Shirley? Only Elaine, and that was years and years later, when the two of us were treating each other to guided tours of Memory Lane. Aside from that, I don’t believe I ever told a soul.

  It was the kind of thing high school boys boast about to their friends, but I didn’t have the kind of friendships that called for that sort of conversation. And I’m not sure why, but it felt like something I ought to keep to myself.

  It came to mind a couple of years ago, when that high school teacher in Maine was caught having an affair with one of her fifteen-year-old students. She got prison time for it, remarkably enough, and actually served a couple of years, and got headlines upon her release by marrying the boy.

  We were talking about it with Mick and Kristin Ballou, and all agreed it was a hell of a story, storybook ending and all, and the prison sentence was the most astonishing element of it.

  “You don’t put a woman like that in jail,” Mick said. “You give her the fucking Medal of Honor.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I worked non-union construction the summer between my junior and senior years. We did repairs and remodeling for landlords, and then our crew got a big job, working on a three-story frame house in Kingsbridge. It had been chopped up into a real rabbit warren, and we ripped out partitions and turned it back into a duplex, and brightened up the exterior with aluminum siding.

  I wasn’t particularly handy, but if you showed me how to do something I could generally get the hang of it, and nobody expected us to work ourselves to death. I got along with everybody, and the pay was good, $2.50 an hour, more than twice what I’d made at Perlstein’s. And I got paid in cash, with no taxes deducted.

  Come September, the house in Kingsbridge was still a long way from done, and they’d have been happy to have me stay. That would have been fine with me, too, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it, and a guy in my crew steered me to a pair of brothers from some part of what was still Yugoslavia. They painted apartments, slapdash work for landlords, and they needed somebody on weekends. Only two dollars an hour, and it was good they never had much to say because I couldn’t get past their accents, but the work wasn’t too bad.

  So that was how I spent my Saturdays, and about half my Sundays. Another kid had replaced me at Perlstein’s, but there were plenty of drugstores in the Bronx, and I found one that could use me from when school let out until they closed at seven.

  I went to my classes, but I can’t say they got much of my attention. That was senior year, so the Shakespeare play we studied in English Four was Hamlet, but the experience didn’t make much of an impression.

  We saw Julius Caesar on TV a couple of years ago and there were speeches I could have recited along with the actors. We watched Hamlet a year later and, except for the lines everybody knows, it was all new to me. And that would seem to say more about my time at James Monroe than it says about the plays.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In the books, some of my experiences have been shaped into vehicles for entertainment. Each is about a case of one sort or another, and there’s an investigation, and eventually a resolution. They’re novels, they have a shape to them. Each one tells a story.

  And what the hell am I writing now? I suppose it’s the part between the books, the part you’d skip. And why shouldn’t you? I mean, who cares?

  Elaine might. She’ll read these lines with interest. We’ve pretty much told each other everything—and more than once, as like as not—but it seems to me there are things here I’ve never troubled to mention.

  More to the point, it’s interesting to me. One reaches an age when the past is as interesting as the present, and a bit less difficult to make sense of.

  So I’ll go on. You don’t have to. Your call.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Graduation was different things to different people. For those who’d be going on to college, it was a way station; for those of us who weren’t, it was a much bigger deal, a specific moment when a kid became a grown-up.

  There were parties following the ceremony, parties where parents poured drinks for their kids’ classmates. (And in most cases without breaking the law. The drinking age in New York was still eighteen, and most of us had already reached that mark.) I went from party to party, and woke the next morning with no recollection of having left the last party and no idea how I got home. Did I walk? I didn’t drive, having neither a car nor a license, but did someone give me a ride?

  I’d had my first blackout, although I didn’t know to call it that. I did know that this sort of thing happened if a person drank too much, which I’d evidently done.

  No harm. I woke up in my own bed with no symptoms beyond a thirst it took a whole quart of water to quench.

  I’ve told this story at AA meetings. No need to drag it out now.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  What I was getting at—at the graduation parties, there was something I heard more than one or two of my classmates say. “From here on in it’s all downhill.”

  Like this was the high point of the lives they were destined to lead. The glory years of high school were behind them, and all the future could be expected to hold was a dead-end job, pushing papers or a hand truck.

  That’s if you were a boy. If you were a girl you’d spend the rest of your life making beds and washing clothes and cooking meals and wiping kids’ noses and bottoms. Or maybe you’d wind up emptying bedpans at a hospital or teaching geography to fifth-graders who didn’t care about any place you couldn’t get to on the D train.

  All downhill.

  I may have echoed the sentiment, or at least nodded along with it, but I didn’t really see it that way. I couldn’t picture my time at James Monroe as any sort of glory years, and in a sense I’d had an early graduation when my father took that cigarette break on the Canarsie line.

  And something else. I had two jobs lined up, one in a construction crew not unlike where I’d worked the previous summer, the other an evening shift in the warehouse at a freight-handling company. They were both dead-end jobs, but I didn’t expect to be working either of them for the rest of my life.

  I don’t know that I could have told you this at the time, but I never ceased to be essentially optimistic at heart. The future was invisible, out of sight beyond the horizon, but an invisible future could as easily turn out to be bright as dark.

  Did I get this from my father? The world, he’d assured me, was a hard old place, and there’s no question he saw a dark side to it.

  But there was something that made him pick himself up whenever he fell down, something that always steered him to a new job after he’d walked away from an old one. Maybe it was the same thing that led him to reach for the drink that might give him a lift.

  However I came by it, somewhere within myself I knew that the life I was leading was temporary. I’d get through it, and there’d be something interesting on the other side.

  First, though, I had to wait for my mother to die.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Not consciously.

  I worked my two jobs, painting and patching plaster mornings and afternoons with Harry Ziegler’s crew, shifting parcels and crates evenings at Railway Express. I lived at home, of course. Where else would I live?

  She was almost always up in time to make my breakfast. I’d started drinking coffee by then, and she’d pour me a cup and put something in front of me, a couple of eggs or some cereal. It was Hobson’s Choice and she was Hobson, and that was fine because I didn’t really care whether I had two over easy or a bowl of Grape-Nuts.

  She’d sit across the table from me, and drink a cup of coffee. And smoke a Chesterfield or two.

  At first I would generally make it home for dinner, but I didn’t have all that much time between my day and evening jobs, and sometimes there was a change of trains involved in getting from one to the other. It was easier to pick up something along the way, a slice of pizza or a deli sandwich, and then I discovered the steam table at a Blarney Stone around the corner from Railway Express. They’d never get any Michelin stars, but the food was tasty enough, and the price was right, and instead of a snack you were getting a balanced meal.

  And you could improve the balance with a glass of beer.

  Or even two. I wondered if anybody at Railway Express would care, until I realized that most of my co-workers were half in the bag themselves. The manager kept a bottle of Old Crow in his desk, and I never heard him say anything about his drinking, or anyone else’s.

  I might have a drink afterward, on my way home, or I might not. I’d almost always find her in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette, looking at something on the television set. I’d sit a while and we’d talk, and you’d think I could remember what we talked about, but all those conversations just drifted away like plumes of smoke.

  Smoke.

  She would cough. It was what even in those relatively innocent times everybody called a cigarette cough. It got worse over time, as everything always does, and sometimes she’d be wracked with coughing and unable to stop. And then she’d get hold of herself, and say These damn things! and crush out the current cigarette, and a few minutes later she’d light the next one.

  Why drag this out? I guess she must have had COPD for years, although it would be many more years before I ever heard the term. When she finally saw a doctor he told her it was emphysema, and it couldn’t be reversed, but if she stopped smoking it could be arrested, or at least slowed down.

  She tried to stop, and couldn’t, and the next time she went to the doctor he took an x-ray and diagnosed lung cancer, although I don’t believe she ever spoke the word.

  “He took an x-ray. He found, you know, what you’d expect to find.”

  Mustn’t say the C-word. You could die of it, but don’t ever fucking say it out loud.

  Nowadays there’d be radiation and chemo, and she might get years out of it, maybe even enough of them to wind up dying of something else. And if she’d had Blue Cross, or pots of money, perhaps they’d have tried something that I’m sure she was better off without.

  I found a woman in the building who’d be with her days, and I quit my job at Railway Express, and I’d pick up a six-pack on my way home and drink a beer or two in front of the TV. I wasn’t well cast as Florence Nightingale, but you do what you have to do, and I didn’t have to do it for very long.

  I’ve heard it said that everybody stops smoking, that the trick is to be alive when it happens. She stopped shortly after the x-ray, but not for lack of trying; she just couldn’t smoke anymore, she’d start coughing before she could inhale the first lungful.

  So she was alive when she stopped, but the craving persisted for five months, until the night her heart gave out. I looked in on her in the morning, and she was gone.

  Jesus, this is all about death, isn’t it? This one dies and that one dies and life goes on until it doesn’t.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I went back and read what I’d written, and tried to think what to write about next, and then Elaine mentioned something she’d read about online, an old railroad line with a steam engine operating out of Utica, New York. You took an Amtrak train to Utica, four hours away, and after your excursion on the old train you had an interesting choice of restaurants and accommodations and things to look at.

  And so we took a three-day break, which was just the right amount of time for Utica, and two days after we got back we had Mick and Kristin Ballou over for dinner. Elaine made pasta and a salad, which is essentially her default meal, and nobody drank anything stronger than decaf.

  A mutual acquaintance had died in our absence, and we speculated as to when and where the funeral might be—it hadn’t been announced yet, and might well be across the river in Jersey—and whether any of us felt obliged to go. I don’t know that we reached a conclusion, but someone remembered an observation that gets attributed, probably apocryphally, to Yogi Berra: “If you don’t go to other people’s funerals, how can you expect them to come to yours?”

  “Ah, Jaysus,” Mick said. “Matthew, will I go to yours or will you come to mine?”

  The question just hung in the air, and then he said, “A terrible thought either way, so maybe we’ll be like McGuinness and McCarty.”

  Blank stares.

  “You don’t know the song?”

  Nobody did.

  He sang, to a tune I suppose was an Irish jig or reel:

  “Oh, McGuinness is dead and McCarty don’t know it,

  McCarty is dead and McGuinness don’t know it,

  They’re both of them dead in the very same bed—

  And neither one knows that the other one’s dead.”

  That changed the subject, and not a moment too soon. It reminded Kristin, I’m not sure how, of a song that was neither morbid nor Irish but recounted the elaborate set of marital circumstances that led to a young man’s marriage to a woman who was technically his grandmother. I’m My Own Grandpaw was the title everybody remembered, but no one could manage to recall how the song went.

  I could Google my way to the lyrics. I could probably listen to the song on YouTube. But why would I want to?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Before the evening ended, we spoke more of death. Some remark put me in mind of Danny Boy and the list he’d made of everyone he knew who had died. He’d kept it up for quite a while, until whatever had led him to begin had run its course, and he could find another area to be compulsive about.

  “Danny Boy Bell,” Mick said. “There’s one I’d have to call African-American, because it’s too much of a stretch to call him black. An albino, I guess he is, and white as a bedsheet.”