"Oh, by then I'd lost touch with most of them. After elementary school, we moved across town, to a condo my grandmother retired into on the lakeshore, out in the suburbs. In high school, I didn't really chum around much, so there wasn't anyone to talk to. I did tell my Gran though, asked her why it was such a big secret, and she said it wasn't, she said she'd told me years before, but she hadn't. I think that she and Mom just decided to wait until I was older before telling me, and then after my mom died, she just forgot that she hadn't told me. We got into a big fight over that."
"That's a weird story, dude. So, do you think of yourself as an orphan?"
Art rolls over on his side, face inches from hers, and snorts a laugh. "God, that's so — *Dickensian*. No one ever asked me that before. I don't think so. You can't really be an adult and be an orphan — you're just someone with dead parents. And I didn't find out about my dad until I was older, so I always figured that he was alive and well somewhere. What about your folks?"
Linda rolls over on her side, too, her robe slipping off her lower breast. Art is aroused by it, but not crazily so — somewhere in telling his story, he's figured out that sex is a foregone conclusion, and now they're just getting through some nice foreplay. He smiles down at her nipple, which is brown as a bar of Belgian chocolate, aureole the size of a round of individual cheese and nipple itself a surprisingly chunky square of crinkled flesh. She follows his eyes and smiles at him, then puts his hand over her breast, covers it with hers.
"I told you about my mom, right? Wanted to act — who doesn't? But she was too conscious of the cliche to mope about it. She got some little parts — nothing fab, then went on to work at a Sony dealership. Ten years later, she bought a franchise. Dad and second-wife run a retreat in West Hollywood for sexually dysfunctional couples. No sibs. Happy childhood. Happy adolescence. Largely unsatisfying adulthood, to date."
"Wow, you sound like you've practiced that."
She tweaks his nose, then drapes her arm across his chest. "Got me. Always writing my autobiography in my head — gotta have a snappy opener when I'm cornered by the stalkerazzi."
He laces his fingers in hers, moves close enough to smell her toothpaste-sweet breath. "Tell me something unrehearsed about growing up."
"That's a stupid request." Her tone is snappish, and her fingers stiffen in his.
"Why?"