Activity

I’m aware that, in the telling, my love affair with Janna is hopelessly clichéd—its components so familiar from life, or Lifetime TV, that it could be written out mathematically. How to explain the enthrallment of living it? My family and work —so long the crux of everything I did—became thin topsoi…

we were able to stop side by side at a red light under one of several sets of elevated tracks whose dappled shadows obscured what took place below.

“She’s the opposite of incorrigible. She’s making amends.”

“I don’t want her amends. I want her to disappear.”

“What makes you say things like that, Miles?”

I remember exactly where I was standing when we had that conversation: on the deck of the lakeside Winnetka home Trudy and I had over…

“I prefer ‘screaming,’ ” Alfred said. “Sometimes twice in a week. Sometimes not for a couple of months. Overall… maybe twenty times a year?”

“Do you do it with friends?”

“Most people can’t tolerate it.”

“Family?”

“Zero tolerance. That’s a direct quote.”

“As in, someone used the phras…

The story that I later called A Friendship originated in that mildly depressive state, in Naples, during a week of rain. Of course I knew that I was violating an unwritten agreement between Lila and me, I also knew that she wouldn’t tolerate it. But I thought that if the result was good, in the end…