buried under old newspapers stacked in towersreaching higher than his head. All that’s spared is a pathway as wide as a man. There must be rats, but we’re lucky to miss them. Someone on this evening—a landlord? a nephew?—has let the paramedics in to pronounce the king dead but hasn’t waited around for us. As we roll him out to the hearse, Dad says, “You don’t see women die at home alone like this.”
“What do you mean?” I say.
“Even if they’re alone when they die, someone always turns out to see them off.”
“But the men are different?”
“Seems like.”
A few days after picking up the newspaper king I email my sister’s friend Janie and ask her for a date. As with everything else, I don’t see the cause and effect at the time.
----
Philadelphia, you big bitch, throw me a bone. It’s June 1998. I’m twenty-two. I’ve bounced from failure at school to crappy job and back for two years. I spend my time outside the house either dragging the local dead around or getting drunk listening to rock and roll before coming chastely home to sleep ten feet down the hall from my parents. I’ve now handled far more dead women than live ones. I’ve only had sex a few times, only with one partner, and that was Karen, two and a half years ago.
----
At first Janie and I had been buddies. The summer before I started doing removals, I’d worked a temp job—through afriend—at Penn in their Center for Psychotherapy Research. Did they know how much research they could’ve done on me? A few times I saw an old, white-haired man in a bow tie walking the halls. The people who worked there, mostly psychology PhD students, whispered about him in awe. “That’s Aaron Beck,” they would say. I had no idea who he was, but they told me he’d invented the style of therapy practiced there. My job was to read transcripts of hour-long therapy sessions and write up one-page summaries. I noticed the therapists’ mode of challenging the patients: “You say you can’t talk to him, but why?” Pretty much my whole life was based on hang-ups and self-made obstacles that I’d never been pushed to defend or even acknowledge. Things like: of course I have to live with my parents; of course we can’t talk about things; of course I should stay in Philadelphia. Reading other people’s therapy sessions, responding to their therapists’ prompts, I found myself in the best mood in years.
That summer, Janie worked at another office on Penn’s campus. She had long blond hair, which wasn’t my thing. I was looking for a Marisa Tomei stunt double. Janie wore modest sundresses and Birkenstocks, which also weren’t my things. She was never not appropriately dressed for Lilith Fair. But she read Anna Karenina on the El through Kensington, which made her the only one doing that. And she looked at me through extraordinary violet eyes that triumphed over her hippie veneer. And after getting to know her, I saw that her clothes belied a glorious, sad edginess. She would laugh at the same blue material I could get Gazz with. We started a routineof meeting each day at noon on campus at a bench between a statue of Benjamin Franklin and a sculpture of a big broken button. I liked that she could talk for an hour with me barely adding a word—she had fire—but that she also listened when I had something to say. After a few of those lunches the talking balanced out between us, and we found we could get into just about anything and find ways to laugh. After we ate we’d walk around the neighborhood. She was nineteen. I was twenty-one. When the summer ended we were still just friends. She went back to her school in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I went back to Temple so I could drop out again.
That winter she came, at my sister’s invitation, to my dad’s fiftieth birthday party. My mom had organized the night; it would’ve looked funny if she hadn’t, would’ve aroused suspicion about their union. So all my aunts and uncles came to
“What do you mean?” I say.
“Even if they’re alone when they die, someone always turns out to see them off.”
“But the men are different?”
“Seems like.”
A few days after picking up the newspaper king I email my sister’s friend Janie and ask her for a date. As with everything else, I don’t see the cause and effect at the time.
----
Philadelphia, you big bitch, throw me a bone. It’s June 1998. I’m twenty-two. I’ve bounced from failure at school to crappy job and back for two years. I spend my time outside the house either dragging the local dead around or getting drunk listening to rock and roll before coming chastely home to sleep ten feet down the hall from my parents. I’ve now handled far more dead women than live ones. I’ve only had sex a few times, only with one partner, and that was Karen, two and a half years ago.
----
At first Janie and I had been buddies. The summer before I started doing removals, I’d worked a temp job—through afriend—at Penn in their Center for Psychotherapy Research. Did they know how much research they could’ve done on me? A few times I saw an old, white-haired man in a bow tie walking the halls. The people who worked there, mostly psychology PhD students, whispered about him in awe. “That’s Aaron Beck,” they would say. I had no idea who he was, but they told me he’d invented the style of therapy practiced there. My job was to read transcripts of hour-long therapy sessions and write up one-page summaries. I noticed the therapists’ mode of challenging the patients: “You say you can’t talk to him, but why?” Pretty much my whole life was based on hang-ups and self-made obstacles that I’d never been pushed to defend or even acknowledge. Things like: of course I have to live with my parents; of course we can’t talk about things; of course I should stay in Philadelphia. Reading other people’s therapy sessions, responding to their therapists’ prompts, I found myself in the best mood in years.
That summer, Janie worked at another office on Penn’s campus. She had long blond hair, which wasn’t my thing. I was looking for a Marisa Tomei stunt double. Janie wore modest sundresses and Birkenstocks, which also weren’t my things. She was never not appropriately dressed for Lilith Fair. But she read Anna Karenina on the El through Kensington, which made her the only one doing that. And she looked at me through extraordinary violet eyes that triumphed over her hippie veneer. And after getting to know her, I saw that her clothes belied a glorious, sad edginess. She would laugh at the same blue material I could get Gazz with. We started a routineof meeting each day at noon on campus at a bench between a statue of Benjamin Franklin and a sculpture of a big broken button. I liked that she could talk for an hour with me barely adding a word—she had fire—but that she also listened when I had something to say. After a few of those lunches the talking balanced out between us, and we found we could get into just about anything and find ways to laugh. After we ate we’d walk around the neighborhood. She was nineteen. I was twenty-one. When the summer ended we were still just friends. She went back to her school in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I went back to Temple so I could drop out again.
That winter she came, at my sister’s invitation, to my dad’s fiftieth birthday party. My mom had organized the night; it would’ve looked funny if she hadn’t, would’ve aroused suspicion about their union. So all my aunts and uncles came to
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