“If you ask me, Mrs. Brewster, Jasmine is unhinged,” Dottie said.

“I’m with a young guy right now, Harold—he wants it all the time!” we could hear Jasmine yelling from the living room.

“When you break up with her, dear, she’ll be calling you, you know,” Nana told me.

“I know,” I said.

“He never tells me he can only get it up with prostitutes, Harold!” Jasmine yelled.

“She’s unhinged, all right—her pussy can’t be so special to all them fellas,” Dottie told us.

“I know,” I said.

“You mouse-dick, Harold—you squirrel-dink!” Jasmine shouted. Nana and Dottie just looked at me.

“I know, I know,” I said.

“You hamster-penis, Harold!” Jasmine screamed. The sound of her hanging up the phone in the living room was very audible in the kitchen.

“A hamster is a new dick to me,” Dottie told us.

I was considering that the eternity Jasmine believed in was of the damnation kind. What I should have remembered was that Nana had long been a pillar of prescience. Hadn’t she predicted that someone would come to harm or be killed on the old croquet court? And while my grandmother didn’t exactly tell me about my mom and Molly, didn’t Nana (in her ambiguous way) imply to me that my mother wasn’t living the bachelorette life my aunts and I had once imagined? “You’re not only the first man in her life, dear; you’ll be the only one,” my grandmother had said. “You’re all that matters to her, Adam—as far as men are concerned,” she had told me. In her beat-around-the-bush fashion, hadn’t my grandmother told me my mom was a one-event girl—hadn’t Little Ray chosen the one and only time she would ever sleep with a man, strictly for the purpose of giving birth to me?

I see now how the ill-starred girlfriends in my life reached an unwelcome pinnacle on that night in my attic bedroom of the Front Street house with Jasmine. I see now how all my girlfriends look ahead to my misguided encounter, years later, with Monika Behr.

22. MY SECOND-MOST UNMARRIAGEABLE GIRLFRIEND

In my life as an unmade movie, I’ll refrain from showing you a flash-forward of my ill-timed meeting with the paraplegic Austrian downhiller, but I can’t avoid the flashback to my night under the attic skylight with Jasmine. If my life were ever a finished film, I would insert here my mother’s voice-over—both her Poor Monika Behr routine and her more softly spoken Poor Jasmine. I would end my mom’s voice-over with her hushed uttering of Jasmine’s name, just as Jasmine—at fifty—slips into bed with me.