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of you to come,” Jennifer said. She was in front of me with the groom. He hadn’t loosened his tie. His jacket was buttoned.
Neat
, I thought.
The fucking asshole
.
    “Thanks for inviting me,” I said. I drank some beer.
    “Boonie, this is John Merchent. Boone Adams.”
    He stuck out his clean, strong, tan hand. “Glad to meet you, Boone, I heard a lot about you up at school.”
    I shook his hand briefly. “Yeah,” I said.
    “Understand you were in Korea,” he said.
    “World safe for democracy,” I said.
    “My roommate at the deke house was in Korea.”
    “You a deke?”
    “Absolutely. I was a deke at Cornell and when I transferred I moved right in. Great house.”
    “Cornell,” I said, “a deke, and a perfect asshole.”
    “Boonie,” Jennifer said.
    “Line from
The Naked and the Dead
,” I mumbled.
    “You’re drunk, fella,” Merchent said. “Better get yourself under control.”
    “Whyn’t you get me under control, twinkletoes?”
    Merchent’s brother walked over and two of theushers. They all looked like Merchent. Everybody at the wedding looked like Merchent. Except me.
    “A whole collection,” I said. “A quartet of perfect assholes.”
    Merchent jerked his head at me and his brother said, “Come on, fella, I think you should leave.” He put his hand on my arm. I yanked my arm away.
    “Whyn’t he throw me out,” I said, and lunged at Merchent. He slid me past him almost negligently and his brother and the ushers rushed me out through the hall and into the parking lot. I sprawled on the pavement and scraped my hands.
    “Don’t come back,” Brother said. “We’ll have you arrested.”
    “How ’bout one at a fucking time,” I said. I was on my feet, but the parking lot seemed insubstantial. I was having a little trouble standing steady. Brother and the two ushers laughed a little, shook their heads, and walked back into the reception.
    I stood alone in the parking lot. The sun was setting. The knee of my pants was ripped. I had gotten blood from my scraped palms on my white jacket. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. I started walking. Behind me, I heard Jennifer say, “Boonie.” I stopped and looked back. She was standing in the door of the club in her wedding dress. “Boonie,” she said. “I’m sorry.” I nodded and turned back toward the street and kept walking.
    She called after me. “Boonie, I know it’s corny, but we could be friends.” I shook my head and didn’t look back.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    I arrived in New York wearing jeans, loafers, a blue oxford-weave shirt with a button-down collar, and an army field jacket with the twenty-fourth division taro leaf patch on the shoulder. I had no luggage except a gym bag with the collection of unmailed letters in it that I had come to call my journal and a couple of new notebooks. In my wallet was seventeen hundred dollars in mustering-out pay. I was twenty-two.
    The one-room apartment I rented on Thompson Street had been freshly painted. But whoever had done the painting hadn’t scraped the old paint, so the walls were lumpy. Around the old four-footed tub and pull-chain toilet, paint had slopped and dried into thick white scabs. The porcelain surfaces were ineradicably stained, like the soul of man, and no absolution would ever clean them. I didn’t care.
    Dear Jennifer
,
    I think about you most of the time. Drinking seems to help some, but the world seems painfully laughable to
me, and it’s hard to concentrate. It’s not just that I’ve lost you, I’ve lost me as well. I can’t seem to feel that there’s anything important, including myself. Even suicide seems not worth the effort. I don’t especially want to kill myself. I don’t especially want to do anything. That’s the real ball buster. I don’t, simply, know what to do. I bought a typewriter. I suppose I should try to write, but I don’t seem to have anything interesting to say. I’ve got enough money for about four more months. According to