I placed the climactic sex scene in the house of a friend of mine in Baltimore’s Federal Hill. I knew exactly, from well before I wrote it, what the characters would do, and what they would say — and what music I wanted playing when, later on, someone made a movie of it.
The accepted metaphor for this coordination of the various branches of the law is “the seamless web.” But the tight four-part harmony of the Manhattan Transfer would have been closer to the mark.
And there in the sunroom I stood, one afternoon shortly after my father had died and we had moved into a new house and my life was all jumbled up beyond recall, with the light of the dying day filtering in through the tree outside, tears welling up as I honked through a requiem for my father with the instrument I knew best how to play.
By the afternoon I was holding my son in my arms. I left his mother to sleep for a while, drove home and – went for a run. I’m the father of three, and I know there’s no accounting for anything in the feelings of parents. But whatever the reasons, this was the most euphoric I ever was over the arrival of a child. I felt – I don’t know – limitless, transcendent, as if I were floating rather than running.
Hmm. I sense a diplomatic silence. One does not simply drop out at the top of a glamorous game and become an anonymous functionary in the halls of justice, marriage or not.
Court reporting was a strange job, sometimes exciting, sometimes boring and frustrating. I had “theme songs” for both moods. For the more wistful one, there was Carly Simon’s Libby. For times when the life seemed a gradually-unfolding adventure, there was the Bee Gees’ How Deep Is Your Love.
I knew now that I had a susceptibility. I might never act on it, but I had it. What I did not have, it soon emerged, was a job.
In my mind’s eye, I’m walking that two-block long stretch of 31st Street in blistering, shimmering, soul-annihilating heat. And instantly, the song that comes to my mind is Santana’s Eternal Caravan of Reincarnation. Never have I heard a number that so vividly conveys sheer atmospheric heat.
Originally Kingsley Amis told me he would have to leave at around one. However, as I was apparently making the right impression, he then invited me to come along with him to what I later learned was a fixture in his life at the time, a Tuesday lunch gathering with various conservatively-minded writers at Bertorelli’s, an Italian restaurant. I was very impressed.
The way I became familiar with the piece is a sort of a shaggy dog story of lonely young people leveraging what social assets they had, and making do with what was available.