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Now, voice to voice, I knew what it must be like to be Merriman, scouts driving down from the University of Oregon to watch him play in his junior year, and now all of it gone.
    â€œYou’re going to be a fine quarterback,” he said.
    I wasn’t happy with the way the conversation went after that. We talked to each other like strangers, nice people, but embarrassed to be on the same planet. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I found it very difficult to talk to my parents.
    Afterward I sat there on the bed, wondering if Merriman must hate me. It would be the kind of envy that would wear off, but maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe Merriman would have to use a cane the rest of his life, walk with a limp.
    It’s brave when you have to bear a burden, and one of my favorite kinds of nonfiction stories is about athletes who crash off cliffs in cars or wake up one morning in an iron lung, and they don’t get back into the gym and run the marathon six months later. They stay handicapped and they inspire children. There’s always a picture in this kind of book, the athlete as he is today, beaming from a wheelchair with smiling kids around him, or still blind, an open Braille book in his lap.
    I admire handicapped people, but I wondered, sitting there on my bed, if that kind of story might be a kind of small lie, to make everyone feel better.

6
    I debated whether to call Paula. But I knew I was going to call her before the inner argument even started. When I did, I was outside in the backyard. I had to be out in the fresh air when I talked to her. I was trying to break my Paula habit, and it was not that easy.
    â€œCray,” she said when she heard my voice. She answered on the first half-second of ring, before anyone else in her house could move.
    I started to tell her that there was some excitement at the factory today. I felt foolish, but I had this episode from real life, and I had played a part in it, and I just had to talk about it.
    â€œI hated all the books I got out of the library today,” Paula said, with that sexy little rasp in her voice.
    Sometimes I hate Paula. She puts on one of these baby-talk lisps and says sexy things and I just about go crazy, getting stiff all over. I wanted someone like Kentia. Not like —I wanted Kentia herself, and it would be okay if she was not insane about the subject of sex morning, noon, and night. That would be the thrill, arm in arm with a woman you would turn to look at and think how cool and otherworldly she was.
    I managed to get through the details of the fire and mentioned that some of the firefighters turned out to be women when they took off their helmets.
    â€œWorking around all those men,” said Paula. “Magnifique! ”
    Paula could only think about the differences between men and women, and not just between the legs. If I said I had to go back into the house for my sunglasses, she would say, “Just like a man.” I used to find this vaguely flattering, as though every time I popped a stick of gum into my mouth I was doing something macho.
    â€œBrave boy,” she said huskily, when I was done telling how I had been prepared to battle the fire with one portable fire extinguisher. Brave boy , in a little baby-talk voice.
    The trouble was, it worked. She could peel me right off my good intentions like so much steam. “When are you coming over, Cray? I need you to rub my back.”
    â€œWhat time is it?” I found myself asking, before I could stop myself.
    â€œI’m lying here on my tummy,” she said. “I have a terrible crick in my neck.”
    She said crick like it was a code word for something tantalizingly obscene.
    I reached the end of the long backyard, and looked out at the view. This was why we had bought the house, two years before. San Francisco glittered across the Bay. It wasn’t just explosions I liked, devastation. I liked the stars, the tiny traffic.
    â€œI’m nowhere near