I attended Brooklyn College, and sophomore year I had a crush on a biology professor who was interested in birth defects. We made love. I felt used. It ended badly.

After graduation, Mother found a husband, and I found a studio apartment in the East Village and began writing a novel. To support myself I worked as an artist’s model. Surrealism was popular. I was a natural.

“Is this supposed to be funny?” Glenna asked, reading over my shoulder as I typed.

I turned around in my chair. Glenna was glaring at me, and for one terrible moment I thought Robin had told her.

“Sort of,” I said. “The narrator goes to Atlantic City, meets a runner-up in the Miss America Pageant, and they fall in love. A beauty-and-the-beast thing. But the narrator doesn’t feel better. He feels uglier.”

“Thalidomide’s not funny.”

“It’s a metaphor and—”

“It’s not funny, Gordon.”

“Got it. Thalidomide’s not funny.”

Her glare stayed on me for several seconds. Then she went off to bed.

I WAS taking care of business at school to hang on to my deferment, but every now and again I found myself fantasizing about taking off for Vietnam, usually when I got tired of sweating out Robin and her big mouth or hearing another of Glenna’s tirades on abortion.

“The guys,” she’d say. “They’re irresponsible dickheads. But the girls—they whine about being pregnant like it happened to them without their permission. Like it’s a curse. Shit, I met patients on my ob-gyn rotation who’d kill to get pregnant.”

My fantasies of running off to war were tempered by bouts of common sense, and other moments with Glenna that were so loving I couldn’t conceive of life without her. On weekends, we glided through New York on the burnished drift of autumn, with the car horns and policemen’s whistles blending like the music of a calliope. I remember the excited hum of the fans at Shea during the fifth game of the World Series as part of this bright October melody. The Mets had come from behind to win the Eastern Division, then captured the pennant by sweeping the Braves in the play-offs, and now led the Baltimore Orioles in the Series three games to one.

Glenna had finagled a day off from the hospital, and we were with my father and uncle in Danzig’s box on the first-base line. Dad sat on the aisle, next to Glenna, opening up her program and pointing out the players. I sat next to her, explaining the sacrifice fly, and Uncle Jerr was seated on the other side of me, as far from his brother as possible, because they hadn’t spoken, except when forced to at work, since June.

Their fight, according to my mother, started on a Friday evening. My mother and Aunt Lil had met my father and uncle at Grotta Azzurra. Life had recently done a cover story on a week’s worth of Americans who had died in Vietnam. The black-and-white photos of the 242 dead were arranged like graduation pictures in a macabre yearbook. My uncle had taken the magazine from his briefcase and was doing his shtick about the war’s being a sin when my father said, “Life should be publishing shots of the bastards we killed.” Uncle Jerr said, “You’re a lunatic,” and my father retorted, “You were born an ignorant pansy, you’re gonna die an ignorant pansy.” The brothers sprang from their chairs, cursing each other. The Godfather was a bestseller that season, so when Uncle Jerr flung the magazine at my dad, who retaliated by flinging a slice of calamari at him, Grotta Azzurra’s better-read patrons thought a Mafia hit was imminent and ducked under their tables, until two waiters escorted my father and uncle out to Broome Street.