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climb into the limo, where a war widow was waiting. There was nothing sordid about these assignations. I would have dinner with the war widows in a rear booth at a northern Italian restaurant on Ninth Avenue. I later realized that the restaurant was owned by Frank Costello, and that these widows had lost their husbands in some gangland version of World War II. They might hold my hand at dinner, but nothing more than that. They were all stunners in their thirties and forties who weren’t permitted to marry again, according to some unwritten rule of gangland lore. These widows “slept” in the coffins of their slain husbands.
    They couldn’t work, but they could go back to school. The widows were as hungry to learn as hawks. I told them about Jackson Pollock, how he lived in the dizzying uncertitude of his art, how his explosion of splotches on canvas was Pollock’s own avalanche of pain.
    We drank wine that arrived in a cradle and cost a hundred dollars a pop, even if I was too young to drink. We ate chopped salads in silver bowls, broccoli brushed with burning olive oil, glazed carrots, goat cheese, and a hazelnut cake cut into two leaning towers, while we sipped coffee with a tinto —stain—of hot milk.
    One of the war widows grew impulsive and kissed me on the mouth while we were in the limousine. She begged me to take off my muscle tee-shirt. I did. She brushed my body with her fingers as a blind woman might have done, memorizing the details of my skin. She dug one hand under my belt and caressed the hair on my belly. Then she started to whimper.
    â€œYou mustn’t think I am wicked,” she said. “But it’s been so long, and I have forgotten how a man feels. . . . You won’t tattle on me, will you, my darling Adonis? They’ll lock me up for a month.”
    I stroked her cheek, and she leapt back like a startled deer.
    â€œYou mustn’t,” she said, “or I’ll explode like Mr. Pollock.”
    Her name was Louise. I never saw her again. I hate to think that Frank Costello punished her from his federal prison in Pennsylvania. But it was all very confusing to me. I’d become a little whore for the mob; I’m fairly certain that Costello or Joey Adonis had an interest in Rosenzweig’s catalogue company. But as Rosenzweig himself had predicted in front of The Polish Rider , I was getting rich.
    Bankbooks leave a trail, according to Rosenzweig, so I kept my cash in a shoebox under my bed. In the Bronx, circa 1953, we paid our bills with money orders. And because I was busy day and night and my mother was half-blind, and my father too forlorn to be much of a courier, the burden fell on my kid brother, who was nine. He had to dole out cash to the landlord and buy money orders at the savings bank. Soon he was my surrogate.
    But the Adonis of Seventh Avenue was falling apart. I could wing it at school, and I didn’t mind modeling under the lights, or having my own page in the catalogue. It was the monkey business in the limousine, that powerful eroticism of touch and no touch. I’d grown fond of the war widows and their sad tale of being buried alive. I gobbled up their sadness until it became mine. Miranda must have sensed my inky disposition, and she tried to pull me out of my own skin. She was having a shindig, a gala for indigent artists, and she wanted the two of us, Miles and me, to help her make and serve the hors d’oeuvres.
    The shindig was set for that Saturday night, and so I feigned illness and begged off work at Rosenzweig’s. I didn’t want to sit in a limousine with another war widow, dine in a secret alcove at Villa ——, burn my lips on coffee stained with scalding milk. I spent the whole of Saturday afternoon with Miranda and Miles. First we had lunch on her balcony—smoked salmon on bread roasted in her oven—while we looked upon the greensward of Central Park, with its lake that was like a lopsided