One such item was read aloud at the funeral; his sister handed it directly to me after the service. On a yellow hospital scratchpad from “Billing and Insurance,” set down in script so tiny and pain-contracted it looked like a modern dance troupe of Martha Graham-trained ants, Marco Eisdorfer had written a list of over one hundred WORDS THAT RHYME WITH PAIN:

butane
Bahrain
birdbrain
cane
chilblain
cocaine
Citizen Kane
Dwane
Duane
Dusquene
deplane

And with his wit intact, the suffering surpassed even sounding like anything. He’d got clear to the S’s when death, which respects only itself and is therefore humorless, shushed our boy.

(His mom and sister gave me that list to “use,” and now I partly have, and therefore can rest easier.)

More and more, these deaths recalled my father’s, my father. “He seems to have a fair-sized chip on both his shoulders,” I’d once felt glad to overhear a neighbor say. Why did Dad feel singled out? Born poor, he got sent to work the counter as soon as he could stand and speak; he came of age during America’s worst financial rout; he’d outlived that just in time to be stuck into uniform and sent to mind the store in France. How can you perfectly corrupt one whole generation?—First you take all the money away, then you explain that money is what mattered most; then you ship them off in uniforms to ensure an even greater conformity and, once home, you give the money back. And more. More than those aproned kids could ever have imagined owning. And you’ve perfected a group totally addicted to succeeding, at their own expense, and at their loved ones’.

Now I had my own disaster. It let me know how little my own dad could’ve managed in shaping his. I, assigned a sewer, perfected water acrobatics on its unlovely surface. But like him, you sacrifice form. But you get ashore alive.

And, later, after the next to last of my friends died, after I escaped New York, didn’t I, moping around the hardware store of my new village, show both his affable surface and his overpressurized triggerpoint? People acted kind to me but I saw they felt they couldn’t really count on me, not yet. They whispered around me.

In a shed behind my North Carolina house, I bent over some old windows. Each pane reflected the silhouette, stern, bowed, manly yet thickened toward the tanklike—and it was so much him, I had to rush indoors and sit somewhere and miss him.

Did I earlier say I didn’t, that I only missed missing my father? What a flippant, queenly, overelegant and quite inaccurate revenge on half my being. I recall his three-pointed handkerchief as he headed to the Rainbow Room: “Watch out, New York!” I remember his saying, “Provide, provide, they told us.” I recollect the sight of him, having dragged my mother’s vacuum cleaner out into the garage, him down on all fours purging sand from the Buick’s backseat carpet, and looking so intense and playful squatting there, using the screeching as something to hide in, his face grown childlike, rapt. Doing good, doing good well.