My father told me that I was overwrought and that Claire had had an unfortunate influence on my speech, but something in his face said that he understood. I said, I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.'

On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckties, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink. Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other I said, more or less: It's the beginning of the summer and I'm standing in the lobby of a thousand, story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless red row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. I was nervous and drank more than I ate my father carefully dispatched his steak. 'Sure,' I said, and I thought for a second about Uncle Lenny, juggling three sandwich halves in the back room of his five-and-dime in the Hill District a million years ago. 'I saw Lenny Stem this morning,' he said. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom. But Claire had moved out the month before. We'd just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will-a year I'd spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him.

At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business.

The mysteries of pittsburgh novel