The book is basically pornography, though it involves a plot, in which a reluctant older man is seduced by a teenager, the son of the older man’s heterosexual friend. What matters to me isn’t the story but the absolute raging heat of the sex scenes, which are detailed, nearly constant, and so hot as to make the book threaten to wrinkle and ignite in my hands. I devour it; I devour it again; I can’t stop. Here is one sentence I remember to this day: “His nipples were pink and promising as surprise packages.” (A memory that makes me glad I no longer own the book, and so can’t tarnish the memory of its intensity through a reencounter with its prose style.)

Having lived in it, having carried it around secretly, reread the best parts, exhausted it (and myself) for the time being, I face the problem of what to do with it. I feel I should hide it, of course, but hiding actually makes matters worse, potentially, especially since Alicia comes to clean once a week, and though I complain that I can’t find anything after she comes, that she disturbs my papers and books, it’s to no avail. I could throw the book away, but I can’t bear to part with it. I can’t ask anyone to keep it for me. So I think the thing to do is to be nonchalant about it, to act as if it is just like any other book, a story bearing no particular resemblance to the circumstances of my life. I put it on my bookshelf, in a calculatedly unplaced way. Why should anyone bother to notice That Special Summer?

So when it’s gone one day, when I look everywhere, quietly frantic, and then discover it’s on the bookcase in my parents’ room, I don’t say anything. I don’t move it, since any gesture to call attention to it would make things worse. “Oh,” I plan to say, “it’s just a book I found someplace, something I picked up. Different, huh?” I leave it beside books of my mother’s, Gone With the Wind and a paperback novel called Mandingo, its cover decked with a sweaty giant of a black man stripped to the waist, chains around his wrists, his face a mask of lust, while a startlingly white woman, nightgown nearly as pale as her skin, swoons at his feet. My mother had thought it disgusting, and read it straight through.

One day she’s drunk, that scowl on her face that means: Stay clear. I try to just go on about my business like everything’s fine, but she says, “How would you like a stick up your ass?”