Miles is worried about money. He didn’t have enough to begin with, and now that he has spent the better part of two weeks running around the city with Pilar, eating twice a day in restaurants, buying her clothes and perfume, springing for expensive theater tickets, his reserve has been melting even more quickly than he imagined it would. They talk about it on January third, a few hours after Pilar climbs onto the bus and heads back to Florida, a few minutes after Miles leaves the garbled message on his mother’s answering machine, and Bing says there is a simple solution to the problem if Miles is willing to accept his offer. He needs help at the Hospital for Broken Things. Mob Rule has finally found a booking agent, and they will be out of town for two weeks at the end of January and two more weeks in  February, playing at colleges in New York State and Pennsylvania, and he can’t afford to shut down the business while he is away. He can teach Miles how to frame pictures, clean and repair typewriters, fix anything the customers want fixed, and if Miles agrees to work full-time for so many dollars an hour, they can catch up on the unfinished jobs that have been mounting over the past few months, Bing can cut out early to practice with his band whenever the mood strikes him, and whenever the band is traveling, Miles will be in charge. Bing can cover an extra salary now because of the money he has saved by living rent-free in Sunset Park for the past five months—and then, on top of that, it looks as if Mob Rule will be bringing in more cash than at any time in its history. What does Miles think? Miles looks down at his shoes, turns the proposition around for several moments, and then lifts his head and says he is for it. He thinks it will be better to work at the Hospital than to spend his days walking around the cemetery taking photographs, and before he goes out to shop for dinner, he thanks Bing for having rescued him again.

What Miles doesn’t understand is that Charles Bingham Nathan would do anything for him, and even if Miles had turned down the offer to work for so many dollars an hour at the Hospital for Broken Things, his friend would have been happy to advance him as much money as he needed, with no obligation to pay back the loan anytime before the end of the twenty-second century. He knows that Miles is only half a person, that his life has been sundered and will never be fully repaired, but the half of Miles that remains is more compelling to him than two of anyone else. It began when they met twelve years ago, in the fall immediately after the death of Miles’s brother, Miles just sixteen and Bing a year older, the one following the smart-kid road at Stuyvesant and the other in the music program at LaGuardia, two angry boys who found common cause in their contempt for the hypocrisies of American life, and it was the younger one who taught the older one the value of resistance, how it was possible to refuse to participate in the meaningless games society was asking them to play, and Bing knows that much of what he has become in the years since then is a direct result of Miles’s influence on him. It was more than what Miles said, however, more than any one of the hundreds of cutting observations he made about politics and economics, the clarity with which he broke down the system, it was what Miles said in combination with who Miles was, and how he seemed to embody the ideas he believed in, the gravity of his bearing, the grief-stricken boy with no illusions, no false hopes, and even if they never became intimate friends, he doubts there is anyone from his generation he admires more.

He was not the only one who felt that way. As far back as he can remember, Miles seemed different from everyone else, to possess some magnetic, animal force that changed the atmosphere whenever he walked into a room. Was it the power of his silences that made him attract so much attention, the mysterious, closed-in nature of his personality that turned him into a kind of mirror for others to project themselves onto, the eerie sense that he was both there and not there at the same time? He was intelligent and good-looking, yes, but not all intelligent and good-looking people exude that magic, and when you added in the fact that everyone knew he was the son of Mary-Lee Swann, the only child of Mary-Lee Swann, perhaps the aura of her fame helped to enhance the feeling that Miles was one of the anointed. Some people resented him, of course, boys in particular, boys but never girls, but why wouldn’t boys resent him for his luck with girls, for being the one the girls wanted? Even now, so many years later, the Heller touch seems to have survived the long odyssey to nowhere and back. Look at Alice and Ellen. Alice finds him wholly admirable (a direct quote), and Ellen, dear little Ellen, is besotted with him.

Miles has been living in Sunset Park for a month now, and Bing is glad he is here, glad the Paltry Three has been turned back into the Solid Four, although he is still baffled by Miles’s sudden change of heart about coming to Brooklyn. First it was no, and the long letter explaining why he wanted to stay in Florida, and then the urgent phone call to the Hospital late one Friday, just as Bing was about to close up and return to the house in Sunset Park, and Miles telling him that something had come up and if a place was still open for him, he would be on a bus to New York that weekend. Miles will never explain himself, of course, and it would be pointless to ask, but now that he is here, Bing is heartened that old Mr. Sullen is finally prepared to make peace with his parents and put a stop to the idiocy that has been going on for so long, much too long, and that his own role as double agent and liar will soon be coming to an end. He feels no guilt about having deceived Miles. If anything, he is proud of what he has done, and when Morris Heller called the Hospital this morning to ask for the latest news, he felt a sense of victory when he was able to report that Miles had called his office while he was in England and would be calling back on Monday, and now that Miles has just told him he has called his mother as well, the victory is almost complete. Miles has come round at last, and it is probably a good thing that he is in love with Pilar, even if that love feels a bit strange, more than a little disturbing in fact, such a young girl, the last person one would expect Miles to get himself entangled with, but without question charming and pretty, old beyond her years perhaps, and therefore let Miles have his Pilar and think no more about it. Good news all around, positive things happening on so many fronts, and yet it has been a difficult month for him, one of the most anguishing months of his life, and when he hasn’t been wallowing in mud baths of confusion and disarray, he has been close to despair. It started when Miles returned to New York, the moment when he saw Miles standing in the store and he threw his arms around him and kissed him, and ever since that day he has found it nearly impossible not to touch Miles, not to want to touch Miles. He knows that Miles doesn’t like it, that he is put off by his spontaneous hugs, his pats on the back, his neck squeezes and shoulder squeezes, but Bing can’t stop himself, he knows he should stop but he can’t, and because he is afraid he has fallen in love with Miles, because he is afraid he has always been in love with Miles, he is living in a state of despair.

He remembers a summer outing eleven years ago, the summer after he graduated from high school, three boys and two girls packed into a little car driving north to the Catskills. Someone’s parents owned a cottage up there, an isolated spot in the woods with a pond and a tennis court, and Miles was in the car with his love of the moment, a girl named Annie, and there was Geoff Taylor with his newest conquest, someone whose name has been forgotten, and last but not least himself, the one with no girlfriend, the odd man out as usual. They arrived late, sometime between midnight and one o’clock in the morning, and because they were hot and stiff after the long drive, someone suggested they cool off in the pond, and suddenly they were running toward the water, stripping off their clothes, and wading in. He remembers how pleasant it was, splashing around in that remote place with the moon and the stars overhead, the crickets singing in the woods, the warm breeze blowing against his back, along with the pleasure of  seeing the bodies of the girls, the long-legged Annie with her flat stomach and delightfully curved rear end, and Geoff’s girlfriend, short and round, with large breasts and frizzy strands of dark hair twining over her shoulders. But it wasn’t sexual pleasure, there was nothing erotic about what they were doing, it was simple corporeal ease, the pleasure of feeling the water and the air against your skin, of lolling around in the open on a hot summer night, of being with your friends. He was the first one to come out, and as he stood at the edge of the pond, he saw that the others had paired off, that the two couples were standing chest-deep in the water, and each couple was embracing, and as he watched Miles and Annie with their arms around each other and their mouths locked in a prolonged kiss, the strangest thought occurred to him, something that took him completely by surprise. Annie was incontestably a beautiful girl, one of the loveliest girls he had ever met, and the logic of the situation demanded that he feel envious of Miles for having such a beautiful girl in his arms, for being attractive enough to have won the affections of such a desirable creature, but as he watched the two of them kissing in the water, he understood that the envy he felt was directed toward Annie, not Miles, that he wanted to be in Annie’s place and to be kissing Miles himself. A moment later, they began walking toward the edge of the pond, walking straight toward him, and as Miles’s body emerged from the water, Bing saw that he had an erection, a large, fully formed erection, and the sight of that stiffened penis aroused him, excited him in a way he never would have thought possible, and before Miles had touched dry ground, Bing had an erection of his own, a turn of events that so bewildered him that he ran back into the pond and dove under the water to conceal his embarrassment.

He suppressed the memory of that night for years, never returned to it even in the darkest, most private realms of his imagination, but then Miles came back, and with Miles the memory came back, and for the past month Bing has been replaying that scene in his head five times a day, ten times a day, and by now he no longer knows who or what he is. Does his response to that erect phallus glimpsed in the moonlight eleven years ago mean that he prefers men to women, that he is more attracted to male bodies than female bodies, and if that is the case, could that account for his singular run of failure with the women he has courted over the years? He doesn’t know. The only thing he can say with any certainty is that he is drawn to Miles, that he thinks about Miles’s body and that erect phallus whenever he is with him, which is often, and that he thinks about touching Miles’s body and that erect phallus whenever he is not with him, which is more often, and yet to act on these desires would be a grave error, an error that would lead to the most horrendous consequences, for Miles has no interest in coupling with other men, and if Bing even suggested such a possibility, even whispered a single word about what is on his mind, he would lose Miles’s friendship forever, which is something he devoutly does not wish to do.

Miles is off-limits, on permanent loan to the world of women. But the tormenting power of that erect phallus has driven Bing to consider other options, to think about looking elsewhere to satisfy his curiosity, for in spite of the fact that Miles is the only man he craves, he wonders if the time hasn’t come to experiment with another man, which is the only way he will ever find out who and what he is—a man made for men, a man made for women, a man made for both men and women, or a man made for no one but himself. The problem is where to look. All the members of his band are married or living with their girlfriends, he has no gay friends he can think of, and the idea of cruising for some pickup in a gay bar leaves him cold. He has thought about Jake Baum a few times, plotting various strategies about how and when he could approach him without tipping his hand and humiliating himself in the event of a rebuff, but he suspects there is something ambiguous about Alice’s boyfriend, and even if he is with a woman now, it is possible that he has been with men in the past and is not immune to the charms of phallic love. Bing regrets that he is not more attracted to Jake, but in the interests of scientific self-discovery he would be willing to bed down with him to see if he himself has any taste for phallic love. He has yet to do anything about it, however, for just when he was gearing up to cajole Baum into having sex with him by promising to arrange the interview with Renzo Michaelson (not the strongest idea, perhaps, but ideas have been hard to come by), Ellen asked him to pose for her, and his quest for knowledge was temporarily derailed.

He has no idea what they are up to. Something perverse, he feels, but at the same time altogether innocent and without danger. A silent pact of some sort, a mutual understanding that allows them to share their loneliness and frustrations, but even as they draw closer to each other in that silence, he is still lonely and frustrated, and he senses that Ellen is no better off than he is. She draws and he drums. Drumming has always been a way for him to scream, and Ellen’s new drawings have turned into screams as well. He takes off his clothes for her and does everything she asks him to do. He doesn’t know why he feels so comfortable with her, so unthreatened by her eyes, but donating his body to the cause of her art is a small thing, finally, and he intends to go on doing it until she asks him to stop.

On Sunday, January fourth, he spends eight hours with Miles at the Hospital for Broken Things, giving him his first lessons in the delicate, exacting work of picture framing, introducing him to the sturdy mechanisms of manual typewriters, familiarizing him with the tools and materials in the back room of the tiny shop. The next morning, Monday, January fifth, they go back for more of the same, but this time Miles seems worried, and when Bing asks him what is wrong, Miles explains that he has just called his father’s office and was told his father returned to England yesterday on urgent business, and he is concerned that it might have something to do with his stepmother. Bing, too, is both worried and perplexed by this news, but he cannot reveal the full scope of his anxiety to Morris Heller’s son, nor can he tell him that he spoke to Morris Heller just forty-eight hours ago and that nothing seemed amiss at the time. They work steadily until five-thirty, at which point Miles informs Bing that he wants to take another stab at calling his mother, and Bing deferentially withdraws to a bar down the street, understanding that such a call demands total privacy. Fifteen minutes later, Miles walks into the bar and tells Bing that he and his mother have arranged to meet for dinner tomorrow night. There are a hundred questions Bing would like to ask, but he confines himself to just one: How did she sound? Very well, Miles says. She called him a no-good shithead, an imbecile, and a rotten coward, but then she cried, then they both cried, and afterward her voice became warm and affectionate, she talked to him with far more kindness than he deserved, and hearing her again after all these years was almost too much for him. He regrets everything, he says. He thinks he is the stupidest person who ever lived. If there were any justice in the world, he should be taken outside and shot.

Bing has never seen Miles look more distressed than he is now. For a few moments, he thinks Miles might actually break down in tears. Forgetting his vow not to touch him anymore, he puts his arms around his friend and holds on to him tightly. Cheer up, asshole, he says. At least you know you’re the stupidest person who ever lived. How many people are smart enough to admit that? They take a bus back to Sunset Park and walk into the house a couple of minutes before six-thirty, a couple of minutes before Miles’s scheduled rendezvous with Alice in the kitchen. As expected, Alice is already there, as is Ellen, and both of them are sitting at the table, not preparing food, not doing anything but sitting at the table and looking into each other’s eyes. Alice is stroking the back of Ellen’s right hand, Ellen’s left hand is stroking Alice’s face, and both of them look miserable. What is it? Bing asks. This, Alice says, and then she picks up a piece of paper and hands it to him.

Don’t worry, he says. This doesn’t mean a thing. They’ve found out we’re here, but getting us to move will take more than a dumb piece of paper. I know how this stuff works. They’ve given us notice, and now they’ll forget about us for a while. In a month or so, they’ll be back with another piece of paper, which we’ll tear up and throw on the floor again. And another time, and another time after that, and maybe even another time after that. The city marshals won’t do anything to us. They don’t want trouble. Their job is to deliver pieces of paper, and that’s it. We don’t have to worry until they come with the cops. Then it gets serious, but we won’t be seeing any cops around here for a long time—if ever. We’re small potatoes, and the cops have better things to think about than four quiet people living in a quiet little house in a quiet little nothing neighborhood. Don’t panic. We might have to leave someday, but that day isn’t today, and until the cops show up, I’m not giving an inch. And even when they do come, they’ll have to beat me over the head and drag me out in handcuffs. This is our house. It belongs to us now, and I’d rather go to jail than give up my right to live here.