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At the funeral mass, the priest kept calling Bumpa by the wrong name, extolling his brave combat service when he'd been a merchant marine on a luxury liner. “This is ridiculous,” I whispered to my mother, who quickly hushed me up. The undertakers hadn't been sure if they'd be able to dig a hole in the frozen ground, and we didn't know until the last moment if the burial would take place. After the funeral, we finally got the go-ahead and drove to the cemetery, which was located across train tracks, adjacent to a gravel pit and bus depot. In my granny boots, I trudged up the hill to where Bumpa was buried next to his wife. My mother was too distraught to comfort us. She'd gotten into an argument with her father the morning he died and blamed herself for his death.

“He was too young,” she said.

“He was eighty-six,” I reminded her. “It was his time.” But she insisted it was the wrong time and that she could have saved him, and since he was her father and not mine, I couldn't possibly understand.

“Did they at least take him out feetfirst? That's what he always said he wanted.”

“I have no idea! How could you even think of such a thing?”

On Christmas, I opened the present Bumpa had wrapped several days earlier. It was a Japanese woodcut of two tiny figures in a snowstorm that had belonged to my grandmother, who had once lived in Yokohama. He'd had it framed especially for me.

I took the woodcut upstairs to Bumpa's bedroom and cried harder than I'd ever cried in my life. His foot roller and a half-empty bottle of liniment were still on the floor of the closet, next to his Converse walking shoes. Before I returned to New York, I said good-bye to my granny boots and dumped them in the trash. Now they were buried too.

Scott and I moved out of our cold-water flat into a one-bedroom on the corner of Bleecker and 10th streets. He composed songs on his upright piano, while I wrote the lyrics. I fantasized that we'd become a famous songwriting team, like Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager. When we weren't going to jazz clubs, we'd have dinner with his father and stepmother at dimly lit Third Avenue restaurants with great hamburgers and lots of red wine.

One afternoon in midsummer, we were invited to see their new country home in Dutchess County. A classic white colonial on Quaker Hill, it was across the way from where the globe-trotting journalist Lowell Thomas lived. Thomas had traveled with T. E. Lawrence during World War I and had helped create the legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

Scott's stepmother had collaborated with her decorator to make the house look artfully quaint, as if generations of one family had lived there and had passed down their prized heirlooms. Though the house was deeded with “lake rights,” the lake commission, in a move Scott's father attributed to anti-Semitism, rescinded them, and he threatened to file a complaint with the state's Human Rights Commission. In all the years I'd known Scott, I'd never heard anyone mention Judaism, and his father's second wife was a Presbyterian. Nevertheless, Scott's father expected us to go to the lake to “take a stand.” As someone who'd spent her summers at the seashore, I hated lakes, particularly ones in disputed waters.

“I think I'm just going to stay behind,” I told Scott.

“You can't,” he said. “My father wants everybody there.”

We all piled into the car, including Scott's nine-year-old stepsister, who was blond and looked just like her mother. Reaching the lake, we put down our blanket on the gravelly sand, while the other families gave us the WASP cold shoulder. Nobody smiled, waved, or even acknowledged our existence. Finally, Scott's father announced, “Let's go swimming!” Everybody turned around, and I imagined them saying, “Here come the Jews!” Technically, there were only two Jews, but I immediately felt guilty making that distinction. “Isn't this great?” Scott's father said as we mimed having fun. I fantasized that Scott, with his lifesaving certificate, would rescue a little platinum-haired kid, and the family would be so grateful they'd cede the lake rights. But we were the only ones in the water because it wasn't even 70 degrees outside. There were people on the beach wearing Fair Isle sweaters. When the modest sun slipped behind the trees and I had goose bumps the size of eggs, we finally walked out of the lake, picked up the blanket, and drove back to the house.

“Why would your father want to go to a lake where he wasn't wanted?” I asked Scott on the way home. He shrugged and turned up the car radio. As usual, his mother had the most succinct answer: “Because the stupid shithead bastard wants to be a WASP.”

The publishing company didn't have a full-time job for me, and I didn't want to continue fact-checking travel information, so Scott's father hired me freelance to write a guidebook for guests staying in high-end hotels. I was hardly an expert in the luxury sector. I'd stayed in only two semi-nice hotels, courtesy of Scott's father, who'd made the arrangements through a travel publisher. The gay nudist hotel wasn't his fault. The publisher had sent us to report on a Windjammer Cruise around the Caribbean, but the clipper ship sprang a leak and we wound up at a new resort on the French side of St. Martin.

“Don't you think it's weird that everybody's naked?” I asked, looking around.

“You're such a prude,” he said.

“But they're all men.”

“Maybe the women are indoors.”

“This isn't Saudi Arabia! We're on a French island. The French are famous for going topless. The only person's who's topless is a man, and he's wearing a nipple ring.”

Scott stripped off his bathing suit and went into the water. I sat on the beach pretending to read. A man walked over to say hello, his uncircumcised, semi-erect penis exactly at eye level.

“Is that your brother?” he asked, pointing to Scott.

I was tempted to say,
Oh, yes, my brother and I travel to nudist resorts all over the world so I can help him pick up men. It's just like
Suddenly, Last Summer,
and he's Monty Clift and I'm Elizabeth Taylor.

After that vacation, I told Scott I wasn't going anywhere if it involved lakes or gay nudist hotels. Unfortunately, I didn't have the presence of mind to exclude resorts that attracted swinging singles. When the travel publisher asked if we wanted to check out a new hotel in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, we figured why not. While Scott went off to listen to reggae music, where he met one of the many local ganja dealers, I sat by the pool and read Renata Adler's
Speedboat.
Perhaps because it had “speed” in the title, a middle-aged man with a large stomach waddled over from his lounge chair and said, “I assume you like to swing. My girlfriend's a pretty lady. We could have a threesome.”

“I've got a boyfriend.”

“Then a foursome.”

“No, thank you.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Ask him,” I said, pointing to Scott, who'd gotten high and was wearing a stupid grin.

“Up for a little hanky-panky?” the man said, waving to his significant other. She hoisted herself out of the pool and walked over. She was wearing a bikini with a silver chain connecting the top and bottom, and she had a tattoo of a dagger jutting out from her pubic region.

We spent the rest of the vacation avoiding them. I was so desperate I even agreed to go water rafting with the ganja dealer, who, as it turned out, was a classically trained musician. He wanted to know if we had any connections at Juilliard.

“This is the last time I'm going on one of your father's stupid vacations,” I told Scott on the way to the airport.

The Kingston airport was jammed with tourists carrying oversize straw baskets and security guards in mirrored aviator sunglasses looking for drug smugglers. As the country's primary crop, marijuana was routinely brought into the United States, and Scott, with his long curly hair, looked like a prime suspect. I hoped he hadn't been dumb enough to stick a few joints in his suitcase. Was it my imagination or did he smell of pot? Right then, I saw myself spending the rest of my life in a Jamaican prison cell.

The swinger and his partner were on our flight, carrying several wooden masks and a fertility statue. He was wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt, she a crocheted mini. They smelled of sweat and patchouli. “Hello!” They waved, walking right over to us. “Did you have fun?” The man winked.

A guard motioned us over to a long table, where several customs officials rifled through everybody's bags. If they caught Scott with anything, I'd pretend I was traveling with the swingers, who were now French-kissing. I'd explain that I was doing a magazine article on “What to Pack for a Swinging Vacation.” I wouldn't even need to go into much detail, because the guards were already dumping the contents of their suitcases on the table. Out spilled a whip, several dildos, a tube of lubricant, black pasties, and a few other things I couldn't identify. Convinced one of the dildos contained drugs, the official kept twisting it, until it made a loud vibrating noise. As for the bright pink strap-on, which came with a black leather harness, the officials were so fascinated, they waved us through without checking a thing.

The trip to Jamaica was the last vacation we took together. We'd fallen out of love, or at least I had, and I suspected he had too. He was spending more time with his musician friends, coming home late at night, and while I always wanted to talk, no matter the hour, he seemed annoyed that he couldn't sneak in unobserved. Years later, it dawned on me that he might have been seeing someone else, but I never had any proof. I did know one thing: I was stagnating in both my career and my relationship, but I couldn't imagine breaking up. Falling back on an old acting exercise, I'd walk across Bleecker Street, down Christopher, and try to “feel” what it was like to leave. It felt scary. Where would I live? Who would hire me? How would I pay my rent? Complicating matters was that while I was no longer in love with Scott, I still loved him and that affection ran deep. What if I never saw him again?

I was turning twenty-six that January and decided to use that milestone as my deadline to leave. I bought a pair of T-strap heels as an early birthday present, hoping I'd wear them on exciting job interviews or dates. I was getting myself totally psyched. Of course I planned to leave after
my birthday because I couldn't imagine spending it alone.

The night before my birthday, we had dinner with his father and stepmother at a French restaurant on the Upper East Side. The waiter recommended steak tartare, and not realizing it was raw meat, I ordered it. When it arrived, I thought I was going to be sick, but not wanting to appear unsophisticated, I picked at it, while drinking too much red wine on an empty stomach.

After dinner, Scott dropped me off at the apartment while he went to park the car. Feeling tipsy, I took off my new shoes and ran into the bathroom, slamming my right foot against the door. The pain was excruciating. I looked down at my little toe, which now reared off at a grotesque right angle. I'd remembered reading that a broken toe had to be secured to its “brother,” but all I could find was thick silver automotive tape. I wrapped the toe and kept on going. When Scott returned, he found me writhing on the floor, my entire leg wrapped in silver.