Widow's Dozen. Marek Waldorf

in hand by a woman fifteen years his senior (“sort of like you,” said Brigid), though he called her from time to time, claiming he still loved her . . . Brigid and only Brigid.

      “Earthquake weather.” “Yes?” I knew what she meant, had read her mind: I thought I could do that then.

      10

      The apartment beneath us suddenly filled with rowdy partiers—music and thuds making the floor shake.

      “Well,” she asked, “what do you think?” “What do I think? It’s your building. I think you should go down and tell them to shut up,” I said. Instead, we went to see a Japanese movie about a guy whose face gets burned off, and how he goes crazy when he’s given a new one. “I hate science fiction that turns the future into an allegory of the present,” I said walking back from the Castro. Maybe that’s not fair—maybe all sci-fi’s like that. What it meant in the movie, at any rate, was everybody explaining what every stupid thing meant. When the man-with-the-new-face picked up a knife, you knew who he was going to stab and when. Introduce a brother and sister and . . . after they’d fucked near the end, she drowned herself in the ocean while he watched and was zapped into a Francis Bacon meat-monstrosity. “Why do you drag me to these things and then try to pull me out halfway through?” Brigid complained when I met her outside. She had a cigarette going. I took it out of her mouth, took a drag, and handed it back.

      When I was her age and living in New York after college, I was called to my father’s side while he struggled to survive leukemia complicated by Von Willebrand disease. A bout of early chemo pleurisy had landed him in the hospital, originally. I say struggled, and he did, but the incursions he suffered moved slower than that. When they’d tortured him all they could at B— Memorial, he was transferred to Rochester, where our family gathered in the waiting area with other sad cases, and where I read . . . The Bonfire of the Vanities