Sunset Park Read Free Page A

had to admit that from a strictly biological and medical standpoint it was the one truly safe form of birth control in the world.
    For six months now, he has abided by her wishes, restricting all member penetration to her funny hole and putting nothing more than tongue and fingers in her mommy hole. Such are the anomalies and idiosyncrasies of their love life, which is nevertheless a rich love life, a splendid erotic partnership that shows no signs of abating anytime soon. In the end, it is this sexual complicity that binds him fast to her and holds him in the hot nowhereland of ruined and empty houses. He is bewitched by her skin. He is a prisoner of her ardent young mouth. He is at home in her body, and if he ever finds the courage to leave, he knows he will regret it to the end of his days.

2
    He has told her next to nothing about himself. Even on the first day in the park, when she heard him speak and understood that he came from somewhere else, he didn’t tell her that the somewhere else was New York City, the West Village in Manhattan to be precise, but vaguely answered that his life had begun up north . A bit later, when he started the SAT drills and introduced her to calculus, Pilar quickly learned that he was more than just an itinerant trash-out worker, that he was in fact a highly educated person with a nimble mind and a love of literature so vast and so informed that it made her English teachers at John F. Kennedy High look like impostors. Where had he gone to school? she asked him one day. He shrugged, not wanting to mention Stuyvesant and the three years he had spent at Brown. When she continued to press him, he looked down at the floor and muttered something about a small state college in New England. The following week, when he gave her a novel written by Renzo Michaelson, who happened to be his godfather, she noticed that it had been published by a company called Heller Books and asked him if there was any connection. No, he said, it’sjust a coincidence, Heller turns out to be a fairly common name. This prompted her to ask the simple, altogether logical next question about which Heller family he happened to belong to. Who were his parents, and where did they live? They’re both gone, he replied. Gone as in dead and gone? I’m afraid so. Just like me, she said, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. Yes, he answered, just like you. Any brothers and sisters? No. I’m an only child.
    Lying to her in this way has spared him the discomfort of having to talk about things he has been struggling to avoid for years. He doesn’t want her to know that six months after he was born his mother walked out on his father and divorced him to marry another man. He doesn’t want her to know that he has not seen or spoken to his father, Morris Heller, founder and publisher of Heller Books, since the summer after his third year at Brown. Least of all does he want her to know anything about his stepmother, Willa Parks, who married his father twenty months after the divorce, and nothing, nothing, nothing about his dead stepbrother, Bobby. These matters do not concern Pilar. They are his own private business, and until he finds an exit from the limbo that has encircled him for the past seven years, he will not share them with anyone.
    Even now, he can’t be sure if he did it on purpose or not. There is no question that he pushed Bobby, that the two of them were arguing and he pushed him in anger, but he doesn’t know if the push came before or after he heardthe oncoming car, which is to say, he doesn’t know if Bobby’s death was an accident or if he was secretly trying to kill him. The entire story of his life hinges on what happened that day in the Berkshires, and he still has no grasp of the truth, he still can’t be certain if he is guilty of a crime or not.
    It was the summer of 1996, roughly one month after his father had given him The Great Gatsby and five other books for his sixteenth birthday. Bobby was