I tore through my clothes looking for my white dress shirt, but after ten minutes I conceded that I’d lost it somewhere along the way. I went into Jeff ’s walk-in closet. Everything was hung by type—shirts grouped together, jackets, pants, vests, belts, silk ties neatly folded and delicately placed upon a mahogany shelf—and further sorted by color and style, everything perfectly aligned and evenly spaced. There were no less than thirty shirts covered with dry-cleaner plastic, though the standard wire hangers had been replaced with the sturdier plastic kind. The smallest white button-up was still two or three sizes too large, and I took the hanger with me, certain that, fastidious as he was, Jeff would notice the missing shirt immediately. Then I sat around waiting for the interview, growing increasingly nervous as the time ticked by.

2

I jumped on the purple line at Armitage and took it all the way up to its second-to-last stop on Central Street, and from there walked a half mile west to a drab one-story brick building that looked terribly out of place beside Northwestern University’s overbearing football stadium. The company was called Manufacturing Directories, Inc.—MDI for short—and they published annual yellow-pages-type directories that listed every company that did some form of manufacturing. They released fifty-one books a year, one for each state except for Illinois, which got two. I understood this much when my name was called. I stood, buttoned the jacket to keep from showing the shirt pocket centered on my stomach instead of my chest, and followed the receptionist through the door with my hand covering my crotch; I had broken my pants zipper while rushing to get dressed and couldn’t find a safety pin in Jeff’s apartment to close the gaping fly.