That said, he fell so far back into pillows, it seemed he’d dropped down all nine floors, clear to Manhattan’s cold stone platelets supporting this—our diseased, endearing St. Vincent’s Hospital.

“‘Broom closet.’” I beamed.

And Robert, though hearing me, though gladdened that my translation proved correct, Robert was so asleep, we heard immediate snoring. Half comic. Half. We’d just received his final words. My friend, Robert Gustafson, composer of Symphony no. 1, his final words: “Broom closet.”

II.

he parents would meet me at their only son’s fourth-floor walk-up. Rain seemed likely. After last month’s hurricane, any sign of black sky brought merchants scurrying forth to roll up their awnings. The whole town still looked piratelike and scarred, plywood baffles left in place.

Just as the Gustafsons’ plane was landing, I unlocked Robert’s apartment, the red fire door. I figured I’d have time to haul incriminating loot to my place. Then I’d catch a subway back downtown and just wait on Robert’s front stoop. His folks were strangers. But how hard could it be to spot a cab unloading the Lutheran minister and his wife, two silvering blond Iowans, tall—blinking around, toting Saran-wrapped date-nut bars?

Beside Robert’s four-posted bed, a steamer trunk that once contained his carpenter great-granddad’s tools, all brought by boat from Sweden. The family name (also the name of their return-address village) was still spelled here in a Gothicy milk-based blue. Inside the heirloom trunk lined with 1840s chromolithos of fjords, I found Robbie’s kiddie porn.

I’d feared something virulent. That had been disloyal. His proved mostly benign Swedish nudist pix, circa 1953—healthy male children, undraped al fresco, just before the onset of that mixed blessing called “the Pubic.” Boys, colt-legged and scarily pretty, were shown sawing wood, getting into or out of some lake, then toweling each other off, a lot. Boy-children of Sweden sure must swim often.

They must be all platinum and blush. Photographed in black and white, shown silver in an evergreen landscape, they made the most innocent meringue. I sat here on Robert’s immense Federal bed, sat flipping pages—feigning a prim reproach of sorts. My erection shamed me. Then I remembered my mission. The preacher and his organist floral-print wife, bound here in minutes.

Robert’s merciless if fond tales about his folks made them seem so real to me, made them seem already present in these rooms, present and watching me scout for cupid Bobby’s little quiverful of dildo love projectiles. I felt (and fielded) their conventional toxic questions: “Why, son, in two rooms this postage stamp-tiny, would ya keep a four-posted bed the size of a cabin cruiser, Robbie? Not to criticize, mind you, just asking. Hmmm?”