The Vale of Cashmere

Don’t stab me. Don’t stab yourself. Don’t draw a circle on your arm. They want the tangent to be the length of the radius. So first draw a circle on the page. Good. Now draw a line between the point of the pencil and the point of the stabbing thing.

I’m not going to talk to you about that right now, because we’re doing math. So that you can be STEM and put me in a luxury nursing home when I’m old. Besides, what I liked about your father wasn’t—I can’t reduce it to one thing. May I ask why you’re interested?

By “how to talk to girls,” you mean how to flirt with girls? What can I say, I’m a mind reader. I’m happy that you talk to me about what’s going on with you. When I was your age, I was very preoccupied with boys and what it would take to make them … But you’re not going to learn geometry if we … I was going to say “get off on a tangent,” but when I was 15, I would have been like, What kind of walleyed moron would even entertain the idea of making that joke? So never mind.

Okay, Steven, let’s start over. What can we observe about this pair of circles? No, the points in the center are called foci; pull your mind out of the gutter. God, why do you even want to know about that? How about this: I’ll tell you what I liked about your father if after that we finish this problem set with zero digressions. Are you sure you want to hear your mother reminisce about courtship? Will you promise that your soul won’t be permanently disfigured? Is there a particular girl you have your eye on, may I ask? Sorry, of course not. Put down the compass. Because I can’t think when you’re poking your hand with that thing. Thank you.

What I liked about your father was that he helped me find my contact lens. Correct, a commune. It was on 15th, which is considered South Slope now but wasn’t considered any part of Park Slope then. Because there weren’t enough assholes yet. Our building was a decrepit brownstone full of unhandy people. In the winter, there were always a few of us in the kitchen, moaning about the cold, drinking beer, without any warm clothing on. You know, T- shirts, pajama bottoms, cutoffs. The radiators didn’t produce much heat, but they did produce this homey clanking, which dangled the possibility of heat in the near future. Yes, like a crack house, I suppose, except, as far as I know, no one was smoking crack. We preferred Adderall. It was mostly grad students. In a crack house, there would have been a stronger sense of shared values and a common mission.

Well, you know, your father has those broad shoulders. I’ve heard him brag about them to you by telling you how pleased he is that you’ve inherited them. Back then, he usually had crumbs on his clothing from walking around with a scone or a sandwich in his hand. He was studying for the bar, and the only way he could concentrate was to go to the park for short bursts of exercise. So he often smelled like sweat and grass. He would come home from the park with dirt under his fingernails from doing push-ups. It made his hands look homeless. Oh, yes, right, it made his hands look unhoused. He was friendly, always asking everyone how school was going, trying to start a touch-football game. He was so good at not bringing up that he’d gone to Harvard that Harvard was like this very faint hum he emitted. Yes, but a nice fridge.

One hot night in summer, we were having one of our counterproductive house meetings in the living room. A guy said that we should all sign a contract governing the division of resources. Resources meaning pasta, beans, tortillas, beer, cookies, and cigarettes. Your father looked alarmed by the proposal. He liked everything to be congenial and unregimented as far as communism went, because he was a big eater. Big eaters favor a certain informality in affairs of state. He started talking over the guy, saying that what made the bourgeoisie the bourgeoisie was its fondness for contracts.

Sure, maybe he was right about that; I guess bourgeois people like contracts. I know how much you value the things he says, and I think that’s nice. Are you clear on what bourgeois means? Actually, I would say that the kids at Saint Ann’s are rich. Is your crush a Saint Ann’s girl? Just asking. Sorry. Rich is different from bourgeois. Bourgeois is a French word for a person from a town in the countryside. It’s used to mean people who have a little bit of money and so they’re cautious and conventional. We moved into this apartment so that you could go to PS 39 and be in District 15; that’s bourgeois. You and I and your father are all bourgeois. I spent my adolescence dreaming of being bourgeois. Oh, I have no comment as to whether she’s bourgeois or not; it’s not my place to comment on your stepmother’s … If you want to know if your stepmother is bourgeois, ask her.

Anyway. I was sitting on the couch at this house meeting, and I found the argument between your father and the contract guy so irritating that I put my face in my hands and rubbed my eyes to blot out what was happening. I could almost hear a “boing” when my contact lens sprang out of my eye onto my hand. Then it fell off my hand onto the rug. I wore monthlies back then, and I had forgotten to order new ones, so I didn’t have any spares. I shouted, “Oh, fuck, my contact lens,” thus adjourning the meeting. Everyone looked grateful.

Your father dropped to his knees. He searched the carpet on all fours. I yelled at everyone to be careful not to step on the contact lens. I made them all back out of the room, except for your father. Your father had his beard down in the rug and his butt in the air. It was a good look for him. I think he felt bad about talking over the contract guy, and he was trying to redeem himself. It’s worth noting that the rug was foul. That house was full of cobwebs and mouseholes. Even holes that were supposed to be there, like vents in the stove, were de facto mouseholes. The mice would show up at our house meetings to discuss the division of resources. There wasn’t a functional vacuum cleaner or the political will to budget for one. I was one of the culprits, in terms of making the place disgusting.

I was committed to eating vegetable lo mein straight from the container with chopsticks, on the couch, while watching French New Wave DVDs to educate myself. It was all part of a self-imposed training regimen. I wanted to eat with chopsticks and ape the gallic shrug. Because I’d grown up in Peru, Massachusetts, where either of those things was a crime punishable by death. I contributed a lot to the vermin problem, dropping noodles on the floor.

Oh, quite bad. Every morning, in my bedroom, when I woke up and got dressed, I used to shake the cockroaches out of my shoes; we had the tiny ones. They’re called German cockroaches. I used to hold my sneakers upside down and shake them like maracas while I sang “La Cucaracha” to myself. Usually, one or two of the little guys would fall out.

Sometimes they’d land on my bare feet. And then I’d go wash some more of them out of the bristles of my toothbrush. Don’t call your mother a crack whore. I mean it, really. You’re going to go around saying “unhoused” instead of “homeless” but also say “Mom, you’re a crack whore”? Besides, there was no sex work or any unseemly kind of drug use. Just filth. I was young and provincial. I wanted to cultivate good taste and a refined manner. I wanted to speak like an educated person, with an educated person’s references. It would have been nice to clean the floor, but I didn’t have time for superficialities. Kind of joking, kind of not joking.

I don’t think I thought, Wow, what a chivalrous guy. I think I was aware that your father wanted to find my contact lens to prove that he was a good person. That rug had more fauna than the floor of a rainforest, and I couldn’t see very well, so I thought, Knock yourself out; I’m going to go chill. I went to my room and put on a nightgown and got into bed. In retrospect, I was playing a part in the drama, helping something happen. Why did I need to go to bed so early? Why did I need to put on my nightgown instead of my pajamas? Why did I take a book off the shelf that I hadn’t been reading, a book of poems by Frank O’Hara, and sit in bed reading it? Frank O’Hara is a cool poet. He was gay, and there are jokes in the poems. Nobody thinks Frank O’Hara is bad. I knew what I was doing. On some level, I mean. Soon, there was a knock at the door, and I answered with the book in my hand. And there, poised on your father’s trembling finger: a tiny piece of plastic, contoured to fit my eye. Was it the restoration of my sight he offered me, or was it blindness? Yes, exactly, that was irony. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that you like to talk to me and that you recognize irony. I don’t think I can take credit. You’re just a sweet and intelligent boy. Does the girl you have a crush on like irony? I wish I could be more helpful.

Other than that he found the contact lens, I liked that he didn’t try to hang out in my room when he brought it to me. I put my finger on his finger to accept the lens, and I held it to the light. It was covered in crimson fibers from the rug. I said, “What a beautiful gift you have brought me.” We named the things that were probably on it: blood, feces, goat cheese, Swiss Miss, semen. He bowed. He asked how I liked the O’Hara, and we talked about poetry, with the lens still on my finger, and then we said good night. Not hooking up even when hooking up is in the air, that’s the idea. What you want is for the girl, or whoever, maybe it won’t always be a girl, the other person, to think to themselves afterward, I wonder why he didn’t try to cross the threshold of my room. I wonder why he didn’t try to kiss me. And, gradually, for their thoughts to drift to: Wait, did I want him to kiss me? You need to give desire room to grow. People desire things they don’t have. It’s like how you’re burning with desire to grow up and go to L.A. to direct films. Don’t get me wrong; I’m so glad that’s what you want rather than, I don’t know, to live in this apartment all your life and watch TikTok and smoke weed. But you’ve never been to Los Angeles, you’ve never directed a film, and so those things are still perfect to you. You see what I’m driving at?

I wouldn’t say that you’re chubby. And if you weren’t a little shy, if you were one of those kids who started dating at 12, and you were always out with your legions of friends, maybe you and I wouldn’t be so close like this, and we wouldn’t have watched so many films together, and you wouldn’t be so interesting. Maybe you wouldn’t be so well-behaved.

I cannot in good conscience advise you to careen through life infuriating everyone around you as a strategy for getting a girlfriend, and yet I must admit that I was often infuriated by your dad. There was this one party where he insulted the paintings on the wall: “These are quite figurative, aren’t they?” The host had put on a Bob Dylan record, and your father condemned the entire phase of Dylan to which the album belonged. The real problem was that our host was this woman who kept looking around him, at more important people, while he was trying to talk to her. There must be a German compound word for that: looking-around-the-person-you-are-talking-to-for-a-more-important-person. He doesn’t like it when people are uncharmed by him.

Sure, of course, he is charming. Yeah, he’s charmed his way into a number of jobs at this point, sure. Yes, his job does pay pretty well. It pays about the same as the one in Boston. I can believe that people in Chicago like him, sure. I don’t know if that’s the word I’d use for him, but who cares. “Brilliant” is just a very generous thing to say. I’m glad that you feel that way; really, I am.

He was good at talking, sure. I think that I was drawn to, and worried by, something in him that was lost. He left that house not long after we started dating. We pretended it was because it was awkward to be a couple there, with so little privacy, but I think he could tell that people wanted him gone. He told one woman she was peeling ginger wrong and took the peeler out of her hand to show her how to do it. He mocked a guy for being bad at touch football. When I scolded him, he said, “I was raised in a bullshit-filled environment, so honesty is important to me.” I always got him to apologize to the offended party. It made me feel powerful. Because he needed guidance. He would put his head in my lap and say, “When will I be able to stop making people hate me?”

Yeah, we had dinner a few times. Once in Queens, out in Fresh Meadows. The idea was to try Afghan food, but I think the real reason was that it was romantic to get in his hand-me- down, old-person car, with Jersey plates, and drive to a strip mall, and feel like we were in America. The funny thing about dating him was he always wanted to picnic in the Vale of Cashmere. That was his move. But he genuinely liked it there. You don’t know what that is? You grew up here. I guess that’s because I don’t go there, and your father doesn’t live here anymore. It’s in the middle of Prospect Park, but people don’t notice it, so it’s quiet and empty. It’s secluded. A gay-cruising spot, I think. Hills all around, a pond in the middle. The pond has a ruin around it. It was a balustrade, a stone railing from the 19th century. Now it’s just newels. Newels are the big posts, and balusters are the little posts between the big posts.

The one time we did picnic in the Vale of Cashmere, we talked about why we liked children, which was a way of flirting. But also sincere: We did like children. When two grown-ups who are out on a date talk about kids, what they’re doing, beneath the surface, is imagining a future in which they have sex and raise kids. I know, gross, let’s not linger on that aspect of the … It was late summer by then, maybe September, with green scum on the water. There was this island in the center of the pond that was overgrown with weeds. The weeds were so big, they leaned out over the water and touched the scum with their leaves. Everything was very green.

Your father said, “A child is like this.” He made a sweeping gesture to show he was talking about the Vale of Cashmere. He said that a child’s mind was this place that nobody had polluted. It was wild. For him, the innocence of children was this precious thing; it was a form of nature that had to be preserved. I was amused. By his sentimental attachment to the Vale of Cashmere, and by his belief in the purity of children.

I didn’t buy the Rousseau–cum–Pink Floyd shit: Teacher, leave those kids alone. I said that children are joyful because they’re discovering the world for the first time, acquiring a worldview, which is joyful. You can’t separate the joy from the learning; they’re the same thing. It might have had something to do with the difference in our backgrounds. He was into noble savagery and felt that his own savagery had been compromised too soon. At the shore club. Being taught to carry himself like a politician at age 5. The firm handshake, the fake indifference to luxury. The veneer of modesty. The veneer of hardiness. The acquiring of character by meandering around the ocean in little boats. He didn’t want his child’s innate human goodness to be corrupted by the wrong kind of knowledge. And for me, my whole life, it was: Give me all the knowledge you have. Get me the information I need to ditch this shitty little town. When I was a child, my mind was not the Vale of Cashmere. It was this terrified, grasping animal. I wasn’t innocent. I was starving for data.

We came to the commune for different reasons, your dad and I. He was slumming it with the punks between the end of law school and the start of his career. For me, that place was Downton Abbey. Everybody there had gone to a good school. Everybody there had a subject they could talk about for hours if you gave them a little box of wine. That was what made it unspeakably glamorous. I’ve always wanted to give you the knowledge that nobody gave me.

But there was one thing your father and I agreed on: The most sacred thing you could do with yourself, more sacred even than being an artist or an intellectual, as much as we valued those things, was to be a good-enough parent to a child. My stepfather would call me “Hot Lips” as I ate my mashed potatoes, and my mother would smile as if it were a term of endearment. If you’ve ever wondered why I’ve never imposed a stepfather on you … When your father was at boarding school, when he was 13, 14, still a chunky kid; before he had his growth spurt, which might happen to you, by the way, he used to call home crying, begging to come home, because these older boys would grab his ass as he walked by. His father told him, “If you stop eating so much and get some exercise, you can play football, and then they’ll respect you.”

I said, “I will never speak to a child that way, so help me God.”

Your father said, “I will never speak to a child that way, so help me God.” He raised his hand in the air, to make it a vow. And I raised my hand in the air. When people are falling in love, there’s not one moment when it happens. It’s gradual. But that was an inflection point: talking in the Vale of Cashmere about how to talk to you before you existed. We did move fast. We got married a year later. You were born the summer after that.

This conversation has wandered pretty far afield. We were supposed to be doing geometry, and then I was supposed to tell you how I fell in love with your father, to help you learn how to make your crush fall in love with you, and now we’re getting pretty close to your birth. This is a bad thing that’s happening right now. It’s called speaking to your kid as if they’re your friend. It’s what single parents do without even knowing they’re doing it. But now I realize that I’m doing it, so there’s no excuse. Basta. Geometry, now. I’m really mad at myself that I haven’t gotten through at least one of these proofs with you yet. We’re going to start doing your math immediately, because I’m so annoyed at myself.

Yes, he was a good father. I’ll give you an example. When you were 3 years old, we bought the apartment in Greenpoint. It had no walls then. We’d barely been able to scrape together the down payment, and we assumed that I could draw up the plans for the renovation myself and save us the expense of hiring someone to draw them. But when I submitted the plans to the co-op board, they argued that I couldn’t be trusted to be the architect of my own renovation because I was incentivized to say that the work wouldn’t interfere with the plumbing or electrical lines. They rejected the plans, but we still had to move in; the lease was up on our old place, and there was nowhere else to go. One evening, when our stuff was still in boxes, I lay on the couch in despair and watched your father play with you. I realized that the two of you were actually enjoying this open-plan hellscape. He took up the Swiffer and showed you how to throw a javelin. He put on music, and you made him stand you on the kitchen island so that you could gaze into his eyes as you danced with him. You needed to be face-level with your father to dance. I was terrified you were going to fall off and crack your skull.

When you got a little older, what you liked the most was when he talked to you about the law. You would memorize the things he said and repeat them to me, for my benefit: In a public park, there’s no such thing as a trespass; a public defender is a lawyer the government hires to protect people from itself; a pickpocket steals with stealth, but a mugger steals with main force or imminent threat thereof. You would recite and say, “When I grow up, I’m going to be an intellectual-property lawyer.”

Very perceptive. He needed to feel that adoration coming at him all the time. I’m glad he’s told you about the affairs he had back then. It was a menschy thing, for him to talk to you about it. It’s so much better that he be the one to tell you, and it’s good you understand what happened with our marriage. Sure, but I only started after he’d been doing it for six months. He told you that, right? Good.

I think it all started because of his poetry. Did he tell you about the poetry? He had this manuscript, 20 pages long. He didn’t show it to anyone else, just to me. He wanted to know what I thought. I said, “Thank you, dear, I’m so happy that you’d share this with me.” The next morning, he went to work, and I dropped you off at preschool. I went home, and I went into my study, which by that time existed. I settled into my chair, and I began to read. It would have been better if I’d hated the poems. I didn’t feel strongly enough about them to feel hate. They were a distillation of the part of him that he called honest and authentic. What I mean is that they were lyric takedowns of friends. That’s unfair of me, actually. Some awe of nature was mixed in. I said nothing about them at all. My strategy was to pretend that he’d never shown me anything and hope he’d get the message. Probably I should’ve faked raptures. Would it have killed me to writhe on the floor, just a little? But I knew that if I told him they were good, he would have rushed out and shown them to his friends and been humiliated. I was trying to protect him. Weeks went by, and then months. And then a woman called me. A painter, someone we both knew. I wasn’t all that surprised, really. I asked her if he’d shown her the poems. “What poems?” she said. I was ruined for him, you know?

You’re right, that is harsh. What I mean is, my sense was that he was filled with horrific shame whenever he saw me, because I’d read his poems and thought they were bad. So he ran off to sleep with people who didn’t fill him with horrific shame. Yes, an escape. That’s why he’ll never be creative for a living: He has no stomach for rejection. Sorry, Steven, I didn’t mean to make myself cry.

Can we stop for a moment and talk about this conversation? It’s hard, sometimes, knowing what’s okay to say to you when I’m on my own. There’s nobody around for me to consult when things take off in a strange direction. It’s hard to keep my bearings when I’m the only adult. Well, I’m glad you like it. I’m glad we’re close like this, that we talk. I just worry that some of it isn’t good for you. You might not be so shy around kids your age if I wasn’t always here for you to talk to. Like, you have friends, but you might have a best friend if I weren’t your best friend.

Wait, are you asking that just to put off math even longer? Because there’s obviously no way I can ignore that question and force you to do geometry before I answer it. Yes, your father cares about seeing you. Of course he does. Why would you ever think otherwise?

Stop jabbing your hand with that thing. Because I say so. How are we supposed to make any progress when you do that? Put it down. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Why would you think your father doesn’t—

That’s wrong. It means nothing that he moved to Boston. It means nothing that he moved to Chicago. It says nothing about how he feels about you. You think he’s happy that he moved away, and then farther away? That’s really what you believe? You think he’s content, being far away from you?

Tell me something. What did your father tell you about taking the job in Boston, and then the job in Chicago? Did he offer an explanation? Have you asked?

“Wandering in his blood.” That’s an exact quotation? I see. “A natural nomad.” What did he tell you about why he quit the Boston job two years ago? Even though he didn’t have another job lined up? The work didn’t excite him anymore. Huh. And your conclusion is that he doesn’t care how often you see each other. I see. Can’t you tell that he’s happy and excited when he sees you? Every time we do a handover in person, he lights up when you get out of my car. That time we met him in Kerhonkson, he sauntered out of his Airbnb hut and yammered at you while you were still walking up the driveway about what hike you were going to go on and what he was going to cook you for dinner. Huh. You think that’s just his state all the time? Mr. Happy Guy, loving life in the Windy City, far away from you? Really?

I’m so sorry. Okay, come here. It’s okay. It’s okay. Come here. Okay, you don’t have to let me hug you. Listen to me.

In the early days, right after the divorce, when you were 6, 7, your father still worked for Fried, here in New York. Yes, with the big fish tank in the lobby, you remember. The beverage cart! What a memory you have. One Friday evening, when I dropped you off at his place in Vinegar Hill, he asked me to meet him for a drink the next day. He’d found a babysitter for you, so the two of us could talk in private.

We sat at the marble bar at this restaurant near his apartment, and he ordered a Stolichnaya on the rocks with a wedge of lime—I remember the stoic voice he used when he ordered it. He rattled the ice in his glass and sang “La Cucaracha,” which was his way of saying, “Remember the old days, ex-wife, everything we’ve been through?” He told me he’d been forced to tender his resignation. He’d yelled at men in meetings; he’d flirted with a woman who didn’t want to be flirted with; he’d slept with another woman and hurt her feelings. It was his way of being a wild man, living according to his nature, being real; that was what had brought him down. He said, “Please, please, don’t tell Steven what happened.” He begged me to let him come up with a reason that would keep you from worrying that he was incapable of supporting you and that we were going to run out of money. And there he was, the Harvard boy with dirty fingernails, this divorced, balding lawyer, weeping with shame in a bar.

No, we wouldn’t be here if it were just my income from the architecture practice. We’d be far from District 15, my boy. Way out in the Catskills. That’s my guess. I’ll bet there’s a Peru, New York. Maybe there.

Not because I felt sorry for him, though I did feel sorry for him. Because I thought he was right. You were a small child. The truth would have scared you. It would have been irresponsible to let you know that your father had lost control and lost his job and didn’t know what his next one was going to be, and he’d have to go wherever he could find employment. Because his reputation was shot in New York. We knew it might make you think he didn’t care how far away he—I’m sorry. He said, “I know it might give Stevie the wrong impression, but it’s the only way.” I thought you might figure it out around the age you are now, on your own. Maybe a little older. It wasn’t my place to expose him, like I’m doing now. It wasn’t ego or pride that made him keep it from you. He wanted you to feel safe.

I thought you’d probably figure it out when you were ready because what we told you didn’t hold water. Somebody yearns for adventure and excitement, so they move to Boston? On purpose? You wonder why he has a spring in his step when you show up at O’Hare? Because you’re the best thing in his life. By far. I mean, I would hope that he loves your stepmother. But you’re the thing he lives for, and he gets you five days a month.

After seven years up there, he called me and told me it had happened again. Our money is all tangled together, you know. He has to tell me, contractually, when there’s a change in his income. Things had been fine for a long time, and then the paralegals and the receptionists all got together and requested a meeting with the executive committee and took turns saying how scared of him they were. It was the same thing. He’d spent an afternoon making a playlist—I know, I know—and then when an intern made a joke about it, a queer intern, he got angry and said something that he himself found literally unrepeatable. I asked him, “What did you say? Just whisper it over the phone; it won’t kill you.” He couldn’t do it. Thank God he had some old law-school buddies in Chicago.

We still talk sometimes, you know. He keeps a journal in his desk now, at his therapist’s behest. Every afternoon, he writes down all of his impulses, so that he can see how destructive they are. I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine. Probably impulses like: Quote Robert E. Lee at strategy meeting. Or: Ask co-worker bragging about trans child, “Was the trans thing the kid’s idea or yours?” He calls it The Book of Things I Must Not Do.

You haven’t been duped. Not at all. Yes, we let you believe something that was untrue.

But you can admire him even more now. Not joking. I mean, who is more worthy of your admiration? The associate at a small midwestern firm with a notebook full of unacceptable desires, trying to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone, trying to make sure he can continue to pay child support? Or the natural nomad, with wandering in his blood, rolling dice, looking for work that excites him? For me, the answer is obvious. What’s that face? Why does that make you angry? I don’t think that was a cruel thing for me to say. You’re just used to thinking of him as a demigod.

Are you okay? How are you feeling? Will you tell me? Stop poking your hand with that thing. Because I’ve told you it bothers me. It’s not a smart thing to do. That’s my compass, and I’m worried you’re going to—I’m serious. It’s driving me insane. You’re going to break the skin. You’re doing it too hard. Not joking.

Give it to me. You’re bigger than I am now, so I need you to give it to me. You’re going to drive me nuts if you keep doing that. You’re doing it too hard. Why won’t you talk to me?

Steven. You’re going to hurt yourself. Talk to me, please.

I’m going to change the settings on your phone if you keep doing that to your hand. Do you hear me? I’m going to lock up the Xbox. You’re acting like a child. A person who does this is a person who is spoiled.

I might not succeed in taking it from you, but if you don’t stop, I’m going to try. Are you really going to fight me off?

Okay. Thank you. Come here. Let’s have a look. I’m sorry I said those things to you. I was upset. I’m going to get the hydrogen peroxide and a Band-Aid. You’re going to be fine.

Hold still. Then we’re both sad. Yeah? It’s normal to want to go back to how you used to be. I miss my old self too.

For example, I miss when we had flying roaches in the commune in August. I had a technique I developed: I sprayed them with Windex when they were airborne. Your father called it anti-aircraft fire. He used to watch me, shouting encouragement. Like “Direct hit, London.” The Windex gummed up their wings and brought them down. It was all we used Windex for.

You’d hear this tiny thud when the big ones hit the linoleum. It really did look like a bomber catching flak, going into a death spiral, and crashing. Then I’d advance, blasting it with the Windex, until it was almost paralyzed, kicking its legs in slow motion. Your father got some paper towels and finished the job. Sometimes it was a struggle; they’d hide behind a shelf or whatever. None of them eluded us for long. I thought your father and I would always be a team. Ignorance is bliss. When you’re a grown-up, the past is this incredible party, and you can’t get there. Yeah, like L.A. But I’d rather be here, talking to you. Okay: geometry.