All You Could Ask For: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

universe—Maurice should come back as a supermodel, or a basketball star, or George Clooney. If Maurice were to be reincarnated as Heidi Klum, I would not for one second begrudge him the legs that never end or the perfect skin or the hair that always returns to the right place in the wind. It would make me happy, in fact, to know that the winners of the genetic lottery actually earned their good fortune through good deeds. Otherwise it’s all just random, luck of the draw, and some people get to be gorgeous and thin and the rest of us don’t, with no rhyme or reason.
    If Phillip gets reincarnated, on the other hand, I want justice. And I have found just the perfect sentence, an appropriate comeuppance for a lifetime spent with looks and wealth and no appreciation whatsoever for his good fortune. I came across it just the other night, watching Dirty Jobs . (I love that show.) The episode began with scenic shots of what appeared to be a ranch, the sun rising on a picture-perfect morning, and then Mike Rowe came on and said something like “What a perfect day to collect some horse semen!” And that’s what he spent an hour doing. When the episode was over, I went online and read all about the collection of stallion semen, and it was fascinating. Turns out the most common method for collection is with an artificial vagina, but in some cases that doesn’t work, so someone needs to manually extract the specimen from the stallion. That’s right, manually . And as I was reading all about it, one thought kept ringing in my mind: If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I hope Phillip comes back as the guy who jerks off the horses.
    Does that sound bitchy? I don’t mean it to. It’s just that he was the second man in my life to let me down so dramatically that I was unable to cope. The first was my father and let’s face it, no matter how bitterly disappointed you may be in your father you still never wish upon him a lifetime of giving hand jobs to horses.
    But the days when Phillip and I were together do not seem real to me anymore, which is to say I recall a lot of events but I have no recollection of how they felt or tasted or smelled. I remember meeting a shy, brilliant boy in the registration office on our first day at the Harvard Business School. He was older than I, by seven years. He’d been on Wall Street and his firm was paying his tuition in Cambridge. He was a genius, and they all saw it even then, as anybody would have. I remember his bushy black hair, unkempt and curly in the back, which did not suit his face at all. I remember we were both outcasts, to a degree; me because of my father, Phillip because he came from the wrong side of the tracks. Phillip was from Brooklyn, the very definition of self-made. His father, a sweet and charming man, delivered milk. Phillip, on his way to graduating first in our class at HBS, always told me, “They don’t teach us anything in these schools more valuable than what I learned on the streets in Brooklyn.” Phillip was a fighter, and he fought dirty when he had to.
    I also saw a different side of him, though. I was the only one around with whom he would occasionally let his guard down. He could be very funny. His humor was caustic and sarcastic, which I thought betrayed his insecurity at being the only Brooklyn boy in the most prestigious class in American education. And he loved old movies, as I do. That was where we really bonded. He especially loved Humphrey Bogart; in fact, the only time he was ever goofy was when boarding an airplane. No matter where we were, he would always break into the famous lines from Casablanca .
    “You’re getting on that plane,” he would say, baring his teeth like Bogart, in a vocal impression that was dead-on. “If you don’t you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”
    I have always loved that movie, and I loved Phillip madly. It was an Ingrid Bergman kind of love, only I was