I opened the door and there it was: the closet, its immaculate rows of shoes and suits and shirts. Not a thing was askew. The carpet was beige; I could practically see the imprint of my back. Yet I felt a strange numbness. Had I wanted to feel nausea, revulsion, shame? There was the jacket I had tried on as a child—the one that had made my father laugh. I fingered the sleeve, then crouched down and ran my fingers along the backs of his shoes, and finally lay on my back in the middle of the closet, my father’s belongings hanging around me, enfolding me. I could smell the faint odor of his shoes. I raised my knees into the position they’d been in, closed my eyes, conjured Langham’s huffing face drawing closer and then farther away. I remembered again the man I’d accosted on the street, how he wasn’t Langham at all. My stomach clenched and I screwed my eyes closed, drew my knees into my stomach and wrapped my arms around them. Did I want to masturbate? I figured I did. I almost always masturbated on my back, but now I flipped onto all fours, pulled my pants down to my knees, reached my hand between my legs, and bent my face toward the shoes, inhaling them, rubbing myself, faster, faster—the scent of feet and sweat—I closed my eyes and was in Pilz Bar again, draped over the couch—I shifted my weight so I could slap my ass with my free hand—Freud’s eyes, the pulsation at his neck, the spire of the Chrysler Building, the twin cherries of a collarbone, the twin orbs of an ass…

By the time I heard my parents’ key in the lock, I was in the living room, watching out the window as the sun inched toward the horizon.

“I’m here,” I called out, so as not to startle them, but still my mother yelped. She came into the living room and I rose to embrace her. She hugged me to her and kissed my left eyelid—a joke between us that prompted the startling pinprick of tears. When I was little, she’d bent down to kiss me and had missed my cheek, getting me in the eye instead. It had made us laugh, and she’d started doing it on purpose every so often. She hadn’t done it in so long I’d almost forgotten. It meant even more to me that she’d done it after last night, when I’d left early, when I’d been convinced she was livid—well, maybe she had been. I buried my head in her neck.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, pulling away as my dad walked in, shrugging off his jacket and draping it over the arm of the couch. “We didn’t expect to see you.”