The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Read Online Free PDF

like me could have. The restaurant was on the banks of a lovely pond, and during the day we’d sit fishing on the dock, or go to a dumb movie, or else they’d just let me run loose in the restaurant and I’d crawl around the plush booths in the bar and play with that fascinating soda gun with the lettered buttons on the back—this in the crepuscular saloon light of noon, in the cool conditioned air, while the soothing Muzak played and played. I was a kind of mascot for that quirky place. One of Paul’s many talents was calligraphy, and almost twenty years later—long after he’d broken up with Ronny and gone to Los Angeles to work for his brother—I went back to the soon-to-be-bulldozed restaurant and noticed for the first time, framed on the wall, the original invitations for the grand opening in 1968 (I was five), which declared in Paul’s florid hand: “Mr. and Mrs. BLAKE BAILEY request the honor of your presence . . .”
    As for the Arabs, they mostly disappeared after we moved back to the city in 1976—all but Walid, and he was generally drunk and simply sat on the floor like a skinny, scowling Buddha, listing to and fro. One time he was sober enough to help me with my homework—he was pursuing a PhD at OU, his nominal reason for staying in the States—and my mother took a picture of us sitting there with the book cracked open on our laps. Another time I ignored or didn’t see a sign ( STAY OUT ) taped to the door of my father’s study, through which I had to pass to take my morning shower. Inside, Walid and my mother’s friend Lenore were locked in a stiff coital embrace on the foldout couch, both hiding their faces as if that would render them invisible.
    My mother had always cultivated gay men, but now that we lived in the city again they came to our house in force. The more lurid aspects of these daytime gatherings were concealed from me. I later found a cache of old photos that showed, say, Walid using our fireplace stoker to divert the fumes of amyl nitrate (“poppers”) spilled on Lenore’s shirtfront. I saw none of that. To my mother’s credit, the drugs were stashed and the zippers zipped in time for my return from school, and everyone would leave for the Free Spirit disco a few hours later, after a cordial drink with my father, home at last from work and wanting only to eat dinner and go to bed.
    Everyone who floated into the orbit of the local demimonde came to our house at one time or another—the actor Van Johnson, for example, who’d been a big MGM star in the forties and fifties and now was in town for a dinner-theater production of Send Me No Flowers . At the time I hadn’t seen any of his movies, but when I finally got around to it I was impressed: costarring in The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart, no less, the man gave a credible performance as a rugged but sensitive naval officer. Almost a quarter century after that movie, he padded out of a rented limo in our driveway, wearing some sort of eye makeup and calling my mother “Ruth Roman.” I was charmed, though he clearly preferred my brother, then at the peak of his adolescent beauty. When the celebrated actor took leave of Scott with a hug, he slipped a plump, liver-spotted hand into Scott’s pants and copped a feel. Scott expressed some token protest as the limo pulled away, though he was plainly rather pleased with himself. “I felt honored,” he admitted to my mother afterward.
    AS LUCK WOULD have it, our new house was a block away from a parochial school attended by one of my best friends from the country, Brian, whose parents were devout Catholics and didn’t mind the long drive into the city each day. My own parents, debonair atheists both, liked the fact that the school was only a block away. Toward the end of the summer I took the eighth-grade entrance exam while my brother made a point of walking back and forth past the open classroom door with his arms extended like the crucified Christ.
    Scott also got a