Delphinium Books Blog

I was twenty-three, lost and loose in Greenwich Village, 1969. I kept afloat as a worker at a downscale auction gallery in the East Village. At the end of each day, my $20 salary was paid by Ziggy Zazlow, the jolly auctioneer who peeled twenty bucks from a fat roll of bills he kept stuffed in his right pant leg pocket, which stuck out on his hip like a goiter. Antiques were a big cash business and I never once saw anybody write a check. My days at the gallery began with cleaning up the poop of Splat, the vicious watchdog and feral stray, named for the sound of his farts, and who sank his teeth into my ankle each day as I walked past his food bowl, once sending me to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s.

Most mornings at the gallery I spent faking antiques from cheap Chinese import, softening the glaze with steel wool and motor oil. I also gently distressed furniture by dragging thumbtacks in a leather belt across the wood. On Saturday mornings the auctions were held at the gallery, but occasionally we held lawn auctions. Ziggy would drive us to a house on Long Island, where we tagged all the belongings of the owners who had died, or were moving to Florida, difficult to discern which, probably for them, too. It was sad to be foraging through the closets of other people’s lives, going over their personal possessions, shoes, picture frames, the mattresses they slept on, assigning them a lot number. I wondered if one day my own life would be tagged and priced and sold off to strangers. Or worse, not.

I never felt like I had reached a dead end working at the auction gallery. I figured I was just passing through, treading water, waiting for my number to be called in the bakery of life to get a slice of fresh, hot opportunity. Only you really had to listen hard for that number in New York, a very noisy place with a lot of people clamoring for things. Anyway, I liked working at the shabby gallery with the tin ceiling. I enjoyed the whole carnie of it, the big Saturday auctions held in the main room with its assortment of oddball antique dealers, cloisonné collectors, and netsuke mavens who came every week to bid and buy. I especially enjoyed Ziggy Zazlow, with his silver-tongued spiel about antiques that perhaps were not. At the Saturday auctions, I helped carry “restored” furniture up and down the center aisle so people sitting in the folding chairs could get a closer look. If I helped carry the merchandise out to a van or car when the auction was over, I was happy to get a five-buck tip so I could get take-out shrimp and lobster sauce for dinner.

I wound up living this way after attending New York University film school, which left me expertly prepared to do nothing. Albeit an impractical education, it was a wonderful way to go to college, sitting in a dark theater every day, stoned, watching films that were explicated by a young instructor, Martin Scorsese, with whom I studied, and who had a secret student girlfriend I ended up sleeping with, much to his outrage—I had no idea they were involved. When he found out I had slept with her, he screamed at me as we met face-to-face waiting for an elevator on the eighth floor of the Education Building. I tried to assure him that I was innocent, that it was a one-off, and that the liaison lasted exactly as long as Procol Harum’s “A Salty Dog,” which played on her stereo, clocking in at 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Luckily for me, those four and a half minutes didn’t seem to affect Scorsese’s judgment as a teacher, because he still gave me an A on my final exam.

Yes, I slept with women. It was part of my homosexual cure with Dr. Wayne Myers, a talented Freudian psychiatrist whom I’d met at Payne Whitney, the time-worn but respected psychiatric clinic on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I was willingly incarcerated there at age fifteen after a serious attempt at self-annihilation involving windowpanes. I was a gay Jewish kid who lived in a thicket of self-hatred above his grandma’s bra and girdle shop in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a shtetl twenty-five minutes by train and a chasm of erudition from Manhattan.

Dr. Myers, who was my psychiatrist at Payne Whitney, was touched by my deep despair and offered to help. Homosexuality was a psychiatric disorder, classified in 1952 in the American Psychiatric Association’s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” However, even Freud didn’t believe that homosexuality was sociopathic, or that it could be cured, or should be cured. In his 1935 “Letter to an American Mother,” he wrote to a woman who asked him to cure her son: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). . . . By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majority of cases it is no more possible.”

And so, when I was fifteen years old, we set out to reanimate the blighted germs of my heterosexual tendencies, hoping I would be one of the lucky few to succeed. The principal was that if we figured out why I was homosexual, then I wouldn’t be one anymore. In the unraveling, the thing disappears.

I never believed for a moment that Dr. Myers meant any harm. He was a good man. Why did I continue to cooperate in my cure even though I knew it was hopeless? Didn’t I know, deep inside me, that I was hardwired gay? Of course I did. That reality crossed my mind a million times, but I fought it back, knowing that if I embraced the truth, it would mean spending the rest of my life on the fringes of society. As the years in analysis passed, I worried that I would be unhappy either way, as a closeted gay or as a fake straight. Norman Mailer, a writer whom I admired, wrote that the most respectable thing a homosexual man could do was not act on his desires. So I didn’t. All therapy and no play makes Jack a very unhappy boy.

During this period, Dr. Myers’s office was up on East 74th Street in one of those white bathroom tile, doorman buildings that had sprung up all over the Upper East Side. There was a simple waiting room, a blank white space with a few chairs. His sessions were fifty minutes with ten-minute intervals, so the waiting room was always empty. There was a set of back-to-back soundproofed doors that led to his office. Dr. Myers was in his early forties. He had blond hair, kind blue eyes, and he was a careful listener. He also had the unique talent to have a blank expression that was not judgmental, and yet seem interested and concerned. I didn’t look at him very much, because I was in formal Freudian analysis, and every session I lay on my back on a beautiful leather divan, facing away from him to lessen his presence so I could free-associate without distraction. In front of me was a framed print of the center panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights hanging on the wall. This is the panel that depicts a paradise of lust, with lots of cavorting naked figures, including one with a flower planted in its anus.

I had a problem with the foot covering on the couch. Why was it there? Are you supposed to keep your shoes on or take your shoes off? I began to worry about how clean my socks were before I went for a session. Sometimes I took my shoes off, but not if I wore sneakers. When I finally screwed up the courage to ask him if I was supposed to take my shoes off, his response was, “What are your thoughts on having your shoes off?”

There was also an issue with rituals. Dr. Myers asked if I followed any specific pattern before therapy, and indeed, I had a slice of pizza before each session at Original Ray’s Pizza up the block. I don’t know if he asked me this because he smelled the pepperoni, but once I’d admitted to having a slice and a Coke before sessions, he asked me to stop. The sessions were at random times for a reason, he said, and he didn’t want it to be part of a convention I had developed that might inhibit my free associating. I figured, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” and if I was going to be analyzed, I better do it right, so I stopped having pizza, most of the time anyway.

Six years and $100,000 into analysis, nothing had changed. At twenty-one, I was a pressure cooker of testosterone. My head ached from priapism, and at times I felt like my eyes were bulging out of my head with bottled-up desire. Finally, Dr. Myers gave me an ultimatum: Either I took the plunge with a woman, or there was no sense continuing therapy. If I changed my mind about becoming straight, he would recommend me to another psychiatrist, whom, I assumed, would help me make the best of it while I wallowed in the swamp of homosexuality.

Cheered on by Dr. Myers, I became a serial affairist. It wasn’t hard for me to meet young women; my sub rosa indifference was a turn-on. Since I approached the whole sexual thing as more of a tourist than a native, I became a connoisseur of the female body in the way a Jew appreciates the Vatican. It was a matter of honor to be a tender, satisfying partner, so I performed all the obligatory sexual acts in appropriate order. Petit déjeuner, déjeuner, and diner. But making love is not the same as lust. Even psychiatry didn’t claim to know how to make people lust. And lust is the glue of love. Oh yes it is. At least at first. Over the years I had a lot of fun with women in bed, and some of it was passionate, but no matter how good it felt physically, it completely lacked spurca libido, Latin for “filthy lust.” It’s filthy lust that makes sex and love ignite. In my unseasoned mind, heterosexuals tried to find love and expected lust to grow. And gay men tried to find lust and hoped love would grow.

It was a depressing and guilty time for me. I was a cad. Many of the women I dated were sincerely in search of a lifetime companion and progenitor; when inevitably I moved on, it was heartache, sometimes for them and always for me. There were women I thought I could love, but not completely. I was hard wired to love a man more, and I was frustrated and furious with myself.

Then, just like in fairy tales, I was strolling down Columbus Avenue one April night when I was smitten with a girl I saw on the street. Smithy (not her real name, but an appropriate pseudonym) was laughing at something one of her friends had said, all of them fresh-faced Columbia grad students, pretty and smart women and handsome men, great white smiles and good hair, at the prime of their lives, none of whom would ever again be as beautiful as they were that spring night. I couldn’t help myself from staring, they were all so striking, and Smithy saw me looking and I thought I could see from that quick glance she saw something in me, too. Or maybe she caught me staring at the guys too long, I don’t know. I thought she was smashing and debonair, and it wasn’t just the way she looked, it was her spirit and spunk, I could tell just from watching her walk down the sidewalk.

Whatever, I followed Smithy and her friends into one of the noisy Upper West Side Yuppie bars on Columbus Avenue. I ordered a vodka martini and stood near her group, stealing glances. After a few minutes of pretending I wasn’t eavesdropping, she nodded to me over her friend’s shoulder and I smiled. I felt such a tug. I went over to her, shy and embarrassed, and introduced myself. I couldn’t think of anything to say, my usual glibness dried up.

“I like a martini with a twist guy,” she said to me, toasting with her gin and tonic.

I liked her. She was a student at Columbia Law, and she intended to become a public defense attorney to defend the poor and downtrodden. She laughed when I said she should become a private attorney and defend the rich and unjustly accused instead. “There aren’t that many rich people unjustly accused,” she said. “It’s usually the poor ones who get caught.”

After we ordered a second round, she asked if I was gay. “I’m not gay,” I said, trying not to look flustered. “Why, do I act like I’m gay?”

She gave me a skeptical look, so I invited her back to my ramshackle apartment to prove my manhood. I was prepared to roll out my well-rehearsed sexual repertoire; instead I went off autopilot and it was intense and dirty. I thought the top of my head would blow off. Out of nowhere, this happened. “Yup, you’re right, you’re not gay,” she said as we were soaping up each other in the shower. She was correct. Those couple of hours I spent in bed with Smithy, I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t anything.

The next time I saw Smithy, she gave me a set of new sheets. “If this is going to continue, we can’t have sex on Dudley Do-Right sheets,” she said. I thought the Dudley Do-Right sheets were ironic, but I guess she didn’t get the joke. She gave me a nickname, too, the first time I had a petit nom d’amour: “Cowhead.”

“Cowhead,” she called me, lying in my bed, tugging on my forelock when I couldn’t remember whether George Eliot was a man or a woman. “You’re too smart to be so dumb.” She said it didn’t matter to her that I moved furniture at an auction gallery to pay the rent, because she didn’t think I’d be working there for long. She didn’t say exactly where she thought I might be instead, but still, wasn’t that encouragement?

So it was that after several months of dating hot and heavy, I was invited to meet her family at their home in Rye, where her father, Peter, who was a managing director at the marketing firm, JK Allen & Co., owned a house with a fireplace in every bedroom. On the way up on the train with Smithy, I fantasized about what would happen at dinner, how I would charm them into approving of me and I would become a part of the family, marry their smart daughter, and live happily ever after, financially cushioned by my rich in-laws.

Smithy’s older brother, Tiernan, was waiting for us at the Rye train station. He was God’s cruel prank, a dybbuk sent to remind me of what was really possible in my life and what was not. Just one look at him, standing at the curb next to the family’s Saab station wagon, dressed in jeans and black ski parka with lift tags from Vail hanging by the zipper, I knew the whole weekend would be hell. Tiernan was Smithy, but as a man. He was twenty-eight, athletic, a graduate of UC Santa Barbara, a junior partner in a corporate law firm with fifty-two names. I was so deranged by my intense attraction that I couldn’t raise my head for fear of gazing at him. To make things exquisitely worse, Smithy’s demon younger brother, Colin, sixteen years old, pimply and mean, was on to my game and shot me sideways glances whenever his older brother entered the room.

Smithy’s dad, “Call-me-Pete,” played squash at the New York Athletic Club, because “tennis is for girls,” he said, sipping McCallan’s neat. He had primate hair on his knuckles, and I could see his overriding, square jaw in the faces of his handsome children. I wondered, if Smithy and I had children, would they have the boiled potato essence of my Eastern European stock, or the chiseled Anglo-Saxon features of the Smiths?

At dinner, Smithy’s mother questioned my “Cowhead” nickname and Smithy told her that I was sometimes “absolutely brilliant” about things, and other times I was just a plain “Cowhead.” Her mother nodded sympathetically at me. When Pete asked what I did for a living, I said I worked at an auction gallery.

“Sotheby’s?” Pete asked.

“I’m afraid not, no,” I said. I explained the more down-to-earth establishment I worked at. To be amusing, I thought, I told them about Splat the watch dog, and I explained how we faked antiques. The Smith family stared at me incredulously.

“Isn’t that a crime, faking antiques?” Tiernan asked, cutting into a juicy steak.

I mumbled something about the antique gallery being responsible for how it represented its merchandise, not me as an employee.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Pete-the-lawyer said, shaking his head. “Not if you’re knowingly involved in faking the merchandise.”

I had a second glass of wine. Smithy’s mom asked me if I was related to Charlotte Gaines from Arlington who was in her college graduating class in 1950. I said I wasn’t, and I considered for a moment telling her that my family were Askenazi from Eastern Europe and that we’d chosen our family name from a car dealership on Flatbush Avenue, Gaines Oldsmobile, but thought better of it. When she asked what my father did for a living, I told her he was a child guidance counselor in a New York City high school, and she said that she “admired” that my father was a “civil servant.”

“Indeed, except for the civil part,” I cracked. It fell deader than a sparrow in a snowstorm.

Then death stopped by the table. I felt the rare steak I was chewing slide halfway down my throat just behind my Adam’s apple and coagulate into a mass. I’d heard about this feeling, this moment, when the food won’t go up or down, it’s a solid block, and you can’t take even the tiniest breath or exhale, and in a split second you know this is how you’re going to die. I recently read a magazine article about people dying from choking on food. One of the Kennedys—Joan Skakel, Ethel Kennedy’s sister-in-law—choked to death on a piece of meat in 1967.

I knew I had only a few seconds to ask for help, but nobody was paying attention. I abruptly stood up, pushed my chair backward, and when they all turned to look at me, I pointed to my throat. Smithy asked, “Are you choking?” Before I could even nod, her brother Tiernan jumped up, spun me around so my back was toward him, wrapped his arms below my rib cage, and pulled up with a mighty tug. The steak came shooting out of my throat like a shot put. It flew in an arc and landed on the white tablecloth near my host’s salad plate. It was a disgusting half-chewed piece of rare meat. My first instinct was to scoop it up with my napkin so no one would have to look at it, but suddenly the strength went out of me. It was the oddest feeling, my legs had no substance and I started to sink. Big, strong Tiernan grabbed me under my arms and kept me standing while Smithy put the chair under me. There was a small dark spot on the front of my pants where I had peed in fright. I was sorry I hadn’t died.

“You’re as white as a ghost,” Smithy said, offering me a sip of water. It took me five minutes or so just sitting in the chair to revive, during which time I apologized, about 100 times, and thanked Tiernan another 100 times, and died inside 1000 times.

“This is what a close brush with death will do to you,” I lied to Smithy later, shivering at the Rye train station, waiting for the last train to the city. That night there was an early frost and I could just about see my breath, but it was shame that had given me the shivers, not the cold. Smithy linked her arm in mine and walked me over to a bench in front of the closed ticket booth and we sat huddled together in silence waiting for the train. “Do you know that I love you, Smithy?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t know you loved me.” She tightened her grip on my arm and pulled me closer. “That’s sweet of you to say, but there are all different kinds of love.”

I always knew she was a clever girl. In another minute or two, the train came.

I dropped her off in a taxi at her apartment building near Columbia University, and I never saw her again. I called her a few times, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She was a girl who was going places and looking for a traveling companion. “I’ll always have a special place in my heart for you, Cowhead,” she told me a few weeks later, bidding me farewell on the telephone.

“Promise me you won’t call anybody else ‘Cowhead’?” I asked her. She promised she wouldn’t, and I believe she kept her promise. I saw her twenty-five years later, still beautiful, a talking head on a cable TV news show. She was a public defender in San Francisco.

 

 

 

Then one morning he awoke to the sound of booted footsteps coming down the hall. By the time his eyes were fully open, they’d arrived at the door: six Austrian soldiers in blue-gray uniforms. After a brief pause, they entered the room and coolly surveyed the rows of beds in the early morning light. From where he lay, he could see four of his classmates, all of them emerging from sleep and wearing expressions of alarm. He tried to think of a reason for the Austrian soldiers’ presence—a prank of some kind or a misunderstanding about the nature of the school. But no, he could tell already that the soldiers had come to take them away.

The soldiers were speaking German, so Carlo couldn’t understand. He tried instead to guess their meaning by watching how the other boys behaved. Everyone was grabbing their clothes, clumsily putting a leg into a pair of trousers, searching for their shoes. Then an idea came to him. Still without his shirt on, he went to the small box where he kept his valuables. From it, he removed the documents showing him to be an American citizen and thrust them toward the nearest soldier. The man read the papers, ripped them in half and tossed them on the floor.

Suddenly, one of their teachers, Brother Leonardo, appeared, his eyes bright with panic. “You can’t do this,” he shouted. “They are students and not even Austrian. They want no part of your war.”

The soldiers ignored him and shoved the boys—eleven including Carlo—toward the stairs. But Brother Leonardo wasn’t ready to give up. He rushed at one of the soldiers and grabbed him by the arm. The soldiers glanced at each other as if to determine how to manage this inconvenience. Suddenly, one of them drew his pistol and struck Brother Leonardo on the side of the head. He moaned and fell to his knees, blood streaming down his face. The boys looked on in horror; their scholarly, soft-spoken teacher appeared to be badly hurt. Yet Brother Leonardo got to his feet again and stumbled toward the man who’d hit him. As he lurched forward, another soldier leveled his rifle and shot him dead. It happened so quickly. The sound was deafening. Everyone stopped moving and held their breaths. Carlo’s mouth went dry and a stab of pain passed through his head. He shut his eyes briefly; when he opened them, nothing had changed.

At last one boy spoke. “You didn’t have to do that.” The soldier holding the gun replied in words of German even Carlo could understand: “Yes, I think I did.” Never had Carlo been so terrified. He feared the boy’s remark would be considered impertinent and that it would lead to further violence. But the soldier with the pistol said, “Let us proceed. We have a long way to go.”

Outside, four more bewildered students huddled together. A woman who worked in the school’s kitchen stood beside them and protested, asking the soldiers to explain on whose authority they were acting.

“An order of general mobilization has been issued,” one of the soldiers told her. “It’s all quite legal and no further explanation is required.”

Minutes later all fifteen boys were loaded into the back of an open lorry idling on a nearby street. They were still settling onto the rough plank seats when the lorry pulled away.

Oriana Fallaci was a bold, provocative journalist on par with Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters. She was a master of the Q&A, so here is my Q&A—with myself.

Q: Why did you write a novel about Oriana Fallaci?

A:  She was confident, defiant, brave, brilliant, glamorous—basically all the things I want to be. She made an important contribution to journalism—she revolutionized the art of the interview—and I wanted to tell that story.

 

Q: Who was Oriana Fallaci?

A: A girl who was born poor in Florence, raised during wartime, and forced to drop out of university. Yet she rose to fame as the greatest interview of her time, best reporter in the world, a legend. She was born in 1929, when journalism was all-male, so she was a maverick and trailblazer.

 

Q: Why isn’t Fallaci better known?

A: In Europe, she’s a household name. In America, who knows; we have short memories. She lived in Manhattan for decades and became famous in America in 1973 when she interviewed Henry Kissinger, which he called his worst conversation with any member of the press. She’s an untold story.

 

Q: Was Oriana as bold and kick-ass in her private life as she was in her professional?

A: Nope. She was fragile, sensitive, soft. That’s why I wrote the line Every woman is two women. I find it poignant, that she could reach the pinnacle of her profession yet suffer setbacks in her personal life and remain unfulfilled.

 

Q: Oriana wrote about sexism, reproductive choice, and work/life balance. Has anything changed for women since the 1970s?

A: Somewhat. Slowly. And…no.

 

Q:  Why historical fiction?

A: I love movies and books “based on a true story,” or in other words being entertained while learning. The English call this genre biographical fiction, which is more precise.

 

Q: Oriana is also a love story?

A: Yes, a tragic love story, my favorite kind. Aristotle wrote about our attraction to “tragic pleasure.” I thought I was the only weird one who enjoys that kind of sadness.

 

Q: The novel is described as sexy—why?

A: Older woman/younger man: Oriana was 44 and Alexander was 34 when they fell in love. He turned her on to the pleasures in life, both physical but also taking a break from her workaholic ways by swimming in the Aegean or dining outdoors under a full moon.

 

Q: Did your Greek background play a role in your interest in this story?

A: Definitely. I learned my own Greek history by researching Oriana and her love affair with Alexander Panagoulis. He was imprisoned and tortured for five years by Greece’s dictatorship of 1967-1974. I didn’t know a thing about the military junta that took over my parents’ birthplace.  Alexander made a huge sacrifice for his country. There’s a statue of him erected in Athens, but during his lifetime he endured many trials and was misunderstood.

 

Q: How did you research Oriana?

A: The most fun was going to Boston University and studying her archives housed there.  Putting on the white gloves and handling original manuscripts, letters, newspaper and magazine articles, even a Christmas card. They have her original interview cassettes, and listening to her smoker’s voice while questioning e.g. Walter Cronkite brought her crashing to life. Of course, I read all her books, and I watched her being interviewed on Dick Cavett and Charlie Rose on YouTube.

 

Q: What are some of your favorite lines from Oriana the character in the novel?

A: The only thing to do when you’re scared is act. I’m stubborn, I never give in. I’ve had to work twice as hard as a man but I’m glad; it’s made me better.

 

Q: And some of Fallaci’s real-life zingers to world figures?

A: My favorite is “You must be joking,” to a dictator who lied in answer to her question—and there were armed guards in the room! She said to Kissinger, “Unless I’m mistaken, you’re a very cold man, Dr. Kissinger.” She prodded Gaddafi, “You don’t remember? You should” and then said, “I want to understand why everyone dislikes you so much.”  Honestly, the list goes on. Christiane Amanpour has said Fallaci’s interviews should be required reading for all journalists, and I agree.

 

Q: Where did Oriana get her courage?

A: She grew up fighting with her father in the Italian Resistance against Hitler and Mussolini, and it toughened her. At age fourteen, she was forced to surmount her fear while delivering a grenade or carrying secret messages in her braids past German checkpoints. Later, when she had to interview a world figure in the White House or a palace, it didn’t compare to her early risk-taking, and she was not intimidated.

 

Q: Describe your road to publishing.

A: Sisyphus pushing a rock uphill.  It took eleven years, two agents, two freelance editors, carpal tunnel, a new eyeglass prescription, and finally I sold it myself to Delphinium. I am what they call “unagented,” which sounds a bit suspect, doesn’t it?

 

Q: Do you have another novel in the works?

A: Yes, halfway done. But I don’t know if I’ll have time to finish before AI finishes it for me.

 

At age six, there was Bradley with freckles and a voice oddly raspy for his age, the same as mine. A witty boy who laughed a lot; his freckles glowed with humor. We walked to school together holding hands. He grew up to manage a Las Vegas casino and, as rumor had it, dealt drugs on the side. Not suitable at all for the long haul. I can see us hand in hand, walking down East New York Avenue, looking both ways at every corner, finally making it to the schoolyard and running to our respective lines. This was true love. Our romance was brief, but all the years through high school, when we met in the halls, we greeted each other warmly, ripples of memory passing between us.

The next was a girl, Paula. I was nine. It was her name that drew me, exotic, so different from the names of my daily friends, the Barbaras, Carols, Judys and Susans of Brooklyn. Paula came from afar, somewhere upstate, and visited her aunt and uncle across the street during school vacations. Distance, too, was exotic. There was little distance in Brooklyn, the outer or inner sort. I always craved the exotic; my father mocked me when I used the word. Also exotic was Paula’s skin, not black, that wouldn’t have been possible on our block back then, but brown like a Native American or a Mexican although she was neither, most likely descended from Sephardic Jews of the Middle East. I waited eagerly for my mother to announce, Paula’s here. I rushed across the street to ring her bell. I didn’t know then that I was in love.

I picture her sitting on my bed, both of us cross-legged, playing cards or playing with dolls or simply talking about whatever nine-year-olds talk about. After a year or so, she stopped coming. Paula, wherever you are, I missed you so.

Thirteen, a bad year for any girl. We summered in the Catskills, a site of torpor worse even than Brooklyn, and shared a wall and porch with the family next door. The two sons, sixteen and nineteen, worked in the day camp. It was the older boy I mooned over, as girls often fix on the unattainable. He was large and dark (dark like Paula), with black hair in a crew cut, a handsome beefy face, good-natured, unmarred by thought or introspection. He walked around in bathing trunks, making it easy for me to admire his tanned body and hairy legs. For some forgotten reason he called me Tex; I thrilled to the name. One day I sat on my porch in my bathing suit, holding my towel, hoping he would appear. And, miracle, his screen door opened and out he came in his trunks, carrying a towel. Hi, Tex. His voice sliced a path through my innards. I remember the slicing feeling to this day. Going to the pool? I nodded. Me too, he said. Walk with me. Indescribable joy, walking down the dirt road with Lenny, hoping ardently that my friends would see us. It was almost like a date. I dreamed that from then on we’d be a couple, like the many transient couples the summer shaped—only coupledom could ease the smothering dullness—those little loves that ended at Labor Day. But when we reached the pool, he joined his friends and I joined mine. I’d been imagining some horseplay in the water, maybe with a ball.

I relived that five-minute walk all through the summer and the deadly fall. Some years later I married a boy, not my preferred dark or brawny. I loved him anyway. I imagined he was taller than he was. We talked on the phone at night for hours, I in my older sister’s bedroom I’d inherited when she left to get married, as every girl had to do. I was amazed to find a boy who could actually talk and who read books. I didn’t realize till later that such boys were plentiful if you had the patience to wait and knew where to look. It was like buying the first house that you see, and sometimes that works out quite well. I love him but as we grow old I wonder how I could have plunged so thoughtlessly, blind-eyed, into the future with a stranger.

I’d been getting my short stories published in little magazines for many years, but friends would invariably ask, “When are you going to write that novel?” as if it was an errand I had simply forgotten, as if it was a suit I needed to pick up at the dry cleaner.  Alice Munro, by the way, was still fielding this question when she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013!  I mentioned Ms. Munro’s name a lot when this issue came up.  If she could take it, then so could I.  In fact, I had written a novel some years back, a still unpublished one, a family saga set mostly in Iceland.  But even as I was writing it, I considered myself a short story writer attempting a novel, rather than the other way around.  I was probably getting too bogged down in labels, but luckily it didn’t impact my process — if that’s the word for it.  I don’t have the most conventional background for a fiction writer, at least if you look at the author bios in the lit mags where I’ve been published.  Meaning that I don’t have an MFA or teach anywhere and my jobs have never been specifically in the literary field.  However, I had been lucky enough to have signed with an encouraging agent and to possess enough energy and persistence to write at all hours, which quite often means in the middle of the night.  As for the novel vs. short story question, I honestly didn’t set out to write a novel.  Underburn started as a text.  I have close friends in California who tragically lost their home to a wildfire in 2018.  They had moved in with family temporarily.  It was a terribly sad time, but rather heroically they were trying to find some humor in their living situation ― landing with elderly parents who were somewhat challenging and set in their ways.   They told me a couple of funny stories, so I turned one of them into a microfiction piece and sent it to them as a text.  I think they were amused.  Around this same time, I had stumbled upon Nancy Sinatra from 1966, singing her hit, These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ on YouTube with some backup dancers.  I started wondering about those dancers and the lives they have led since that performance (I think about movie extras too!) and how one of them just might have been impacted by a wildfire all these years later.  That gave me Iris, my first character, and got the plot moving.  I was drawn to the idea of the past intruding on all the characters in this story and of having the action take place on both coasts.  Still, as I began writing it, I thought it would end up being a short story . . . and then a long story . . . and then a novella.  Truth be told, the characters just kept speaking to me, as pretentious as that might sound.  I knew it was turning into a novel when I started dreaming about them, when they started debating me in my sleep, and joking around, like we’d known each other forever.  The characters would pop into my head during lockdown Zoom meetings and while I was doing the laundry.  I took a lot of notes.  I’ve written stories that were difficult for me from a technical standpoint or an emotional one, however, Underburn was the most joyful of my writing experiences.  I was so grateful to lose sleep over it.  I still think about the characters, living independently, now that they have moved on without me. I catch myself wondering how they’ve managed during the pandemic, or how they’re making ends meet.  I am absolutely thrilled to see Underburn find a home at Delphinium, and for me to finally publish that novel.  Ultimately, though, it comes back to the work itself, however you choose to categorize it, and the idea of putting something out in the world that hasn’t existed before.