The Other Side of the World. Jay Neugeboren

it, a Benny saved is a Benny urned.’”

      Seana groaned and, both arms around my waist, pulled me tight against her. “I like you a lot, you know,” she said, “even though you’re a much younger man, and more like Max than is good for me.”

      When we woke the next time, I said I’d been thinking about Max—worrying about leaving him alone in our big house. I was feeling nostalgic about him—lonesome really, though perhaps not for him so much as for things we’d done together we wouldn’t ever do again.

      “Lonesome’s okay,” Seana said. “But nostalgia’s a bitch, a veil for rage most of the time.”

      “‘A veil for rage,’” I said. “I like that—Wallace Stevens?”

      “No.”

      “Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan?”

      “No.”

      “A veil for rage because remembering stuff that way, especially childhood, masks how miserable it really was?”

      “You’re smarter than you look,” she said.

      “But I am definitely feeling lonesome for the guy,” I said, “and I’m wondering why I’m feeling this way now and if you’re feeling the same…”

      “You know it,” she said.

      Earlier, I’d been remembering something that happened on one of our first trips to New York. Max had given me a tour of his old neighborhood—shown me the famous places: the Brooklyn Museum, the Botanic Gardens, Prospect Park, where Ebbets Field used to be—but what I’d been remembering about the trip wasn’t anything we did or saw, I told Seana, but what happened on the subway.

      “Going into Brooklyn we’d stayed in the front car so I could watch the train rocketing through tunnels and switching tracks, and I remember being excited—and frightened—by the possibility we might crash into an oncoming train, or that I might see somebody fall from the platform onto the tracks as our train entered a station,” I said. “Then, on the way back to Manhattan, our subway car was crowded, lots of people standing. It must have been rush hour, and there was one huge black man taking up three seats and, with a glowering expression, daring anyone to question his right to do so. He wore a red bandana on his head, pirate-style, and a sleeveless T-shirt—the kind my father said Italians called wife-beater shirts—that showed off how buff he was.