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" ...
he was my best friend, after all, my constant companion at
Sunday afternoon double bills at the
Thalia,
my ever-present source of consolation and conversation
... " (p. 45)
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" ...
It threw me off at first, his not being there - I had no one to watch
Jeopardy!
with, or talk to on the phone late at night - but then, gradually, I got over it
... " (p. 45)
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" ...
And I had started: I lost weight, I went shopping. I was at
Bloomingdale´s
one day, at my lunch hour when a very skinny black woman
with a French accent asked me if I´d like to have a makeover
... " (p. 45)
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" ...
Today, however, the place was in havoc - newspapers and old
Entenmann´s cookie boxes
spread over the floor, records piled on top of each other,
... " (p. 47)
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" ...
"Look," I said. "I´m going to go out and buy sponges,
Comet,
Spic and Span,
Fantastic, Windex.
Everything. We´re going to clean this place up
... " (p. 47)
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" ...
and told him he had tested positive. This was the secret fact he had to
live with every day of his life, the secret fact that had brought him to
Xanax and Halicon,
Darvon and Valium -
all crude efforts to cut the fear firing through his blood
... " (p. 47)
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" ...
Strangers would call me, Germans, Italians, nervous-sounding young
men who spoke bad English, who were staying at the
YMCA,
who were in New York for the first time and to whom he had given my number
... " (p. 48)
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" ...
And so we ended up, as we had a thousand other nights,
sitting at the window at the
Empire Szechuan
down the block from his apartment, eating cold noodles with sesame sauce
... " (p. 49)
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" ...
Lizzie, exposed as an illegal subletter, was evicted.
She lived now with her father in one half of a two-family house in
Plainfield, New Jersey,
because she couldn´t find another apartment she could afford
... " (p. 49)
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" ...
eager to re-create the slumber parties of her childhood,
dancing around in pink pajamas with feet. We were making s´mores over the gas stove ... and
Beach Blanket Bingo
was plaving on the VCR and none of us was having a good time
... " (p. 49/50)
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" ...
Dorrie Friedman put away six of those s´mores with a tidyness worthy of
Emily Post,
I watched her dab her cheek with a napkin after each bite, and I understood:
This was shame, but also, in some peculiar way, this was innocence. A state to envy
... " (p. 50)
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" ...
There is a point in Lizzie´s parties when she invariably suggests we play
Deprivation, a game
that had been terribly popular among our crowd in college
... " (p. 50)
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" ...
I remember the first time I ever played Deprivation, my sophomore year,
I had been reading
Blake´s Songs of Innocence and
Songs of Experience.
Everything in our lives seemed a question of innocence and
experience back then, so this seemed appropriate
... " (p. 50)
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" ...
Finally, reluctantly, Lizzie let us go, and relinquished from her grip,
we got into Nathan´s car and headed onto the
Garden State Parkway.
"Never again," Nathan was saying
... " (p. 51)
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" ...
and switched on the radio.
Dionne Warwick and Elton John were singing "That´s What Friends Are For,"
and Nathan said, "You know, of course, that´s the song they
wrote to raise money for AIDS.
... " (p. 51)
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" ...
We were slipping into the
Holland Tunnel,
and by the time we got through to Manhattan I was ready to call it a night
... " (p. 51)
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