It was St. Patrick’s Day in Miami. Bryn Corley was looking in the mirror, deciding whether or not to curl her hair. When she curled it, it came out tight and blonde and emphatic like Jean Harlow’s; when she sleeked it off her face the Grace Kelly came forward.

It was a quiet summer with a long terrible time of heat. It was blue in the evenings and black at night. The elderberry hung over one side of the house and near

Leo was from a long time ago, the first one I ever saw nude. In the spring before the Hellmans filled their pool, we’d go down there in the deep end, with baby oil, and like that.

I read the New York Times each morning. It’s a part of the breakfast ritual. Hot coffee and the smell of printer’s ink. I depend on the regularity of these pleasures. When the paper went on strike, I suffered

He was one of those reporters. Never in a place long. Always going away, always coming back. Then he seemed to be around more. Then he was calling me up. I knew he did not have the most promising history with women. I knew that. I kept cool, he kept calling.

The subway train in Tokyo was as crammed as a cattlewagon. Crammed with organs, wrapped in meat, wrapped in clothes. Silent and sweaty.

“Hats off, gentlemen. Hats off in deference”: this was his frantic call, erupting out of the oppressive summer night as though it were heat thunder roiling forth from the past.

At the age of eighteen, my mother ­embarked on a movie career in her ­native city of Antwerp. Until then, she had worked for the gas company and taken some elocution courses, but when a studio was built on the Pyckestraat, at the initiative of a certain Jan Vanderheyden, she walked in the door and was hired.

It was going on a month that Lilly had been staying with her parents, Bill and Caroline, at their lake house in Vermont. Although Bill had been a full-bird colonel in the United States Army, there was only one commander in that family, and every time I called I could hear her evil whispers poisoning his ear. 

He weighed 210 pounds buck-ass naked; 217 in his leather jacket and boots, which he wore that crisp March evening to the bar along with a gold pin in his lapel. It was shaped like a spade, a gift from his wife when they were young, once she’d discovered how much he liked expensive-looking things.