Read The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) for Free Online Page B

beginning to see that Ken was
     more bisexual than I thought,” I offered. She replied, “He was tri-sexual—he’d try anything.” I didn’t know what to say to
     this joke, which seemed decades old. At some point I mentioned that Ken had joined Narcotics Anonymous two years before he
     died, to quit his pot habit, and Christine replied, “Naturally he would throw himself into that role, too.” I hadn’t intended
     to bolster her phases theory. “I guess he really was self-medicating with the pot,” I ventured. “For depression, I mean. That
     was one of the hardest things for me to deal with after he died—that he wasn’t a very happy man.” “Oh, he was happy,” Christine
     said quickly. “Back in college. He was very happy then.” Evidently she meant to reassure me, but I could hardly feel reassured
     by the idea that my brother’s life had been downhill from age twenty-two until his death at thirty-seven. I wanted to get
     off the phone now. Ihad always liked Christine and even looked up to her as a corollary to looking up to my brother. And I had felt enormous sympathy
     for her when she told me, at the beginning of the conversation, that her father had died suddenly, in a car accident, only
     a month before Ken—whose death, from her point of view, was also sudden, since she hadn’t known of his illness. I had imagined
     moreover that the particular pain of losing her ex-lover would have been difficult to explain to those around her, since by
     then she was married with a young daughter. So I had hoped our interaction that night would be helpful to both of us, but
     apparently we were at cross-purposes. I said good-night, pleading jet lag. Then I couldn’t sleep.

15
    O N THE CROWDED platform a boy pretended to drop coins: “Clink. Clink-clink-clink,” he said.
    The continued glacially slow unfolding of non-news on TV.
    Noelle said, “The collapse of the World Trade Center has so much symbolic meaning I can’t even begin to fathom it.”
    “Calm down,” I told myself, as I entered the fray of Bed Bath & Beyond.
    A friend told me about a video artist who slowed down the movie
Psycho
, so that it lasts twenty-four hours.
    Of Christine, Gabby wrote, “I think
she’s
stuck.”
    I joked to John that an American flag on the antenna of a police car was gilding the lily.
    I returned from the bathroom and found myself suddenly in the mood—it had been weeks.
    John’s incredibly delicate, sustained touch …
    As he read the paper I asked him for the butter, and he replied, with mock annoyance, “Excuse me, I’m busy trying not to get
blown up
.”
    E-mail from my mother: “… Sorry to ‘dump’ on you but I needed to blow off steam.”
    One of the columnists at the magazine where I worked suggested it was time we “consider” torturing suspected terrorists.
    I imagined changing my out-of-office e-mail reply to “Eat me.”
    Soon it was the weekend again and John and I saw the most incredible gingko tree, huge and bright yellow in the light.
    We descended toward the river, which was now pea green.
    Charles Henri Ford: “To understand the mystery of our being in time—the body’s reason and the soul’s future—enough for a lifetime’s
     meditation, without bothering about the stars, space and infinity.”
    As seen from the promenade, the water was evenly gray and shining under the clouds, and the breeze seemed to be licking it
     clean.
    I suddenly realized it had been naïve of me to think Christine could be objective about my brother—her ex-lover, after all,who had left her to be gay—and it didn’t matter how many years ago that was.
    My parents’ cruise was canceled because the Delta Queen Steamboat Company went bankrupt.
    The box containing Ken’s diary, which I had sent to myself at work, was held up in the mailroom for several days, because
     of an anthrax scare.
    At the editors’ meeting I attended, they smiled secretly to one another whenever a certain editor spoke, and