Refrigeration Blues by Richard Natale

It was supposed to be a memorable suicide, one that set tongues clucking and heads rattling in bewilderment: “Did you hear about Matt? What a shock! I can’t believe he would do such a thing.”

The originality and daring of my self-offing, I imagined, would have a ripple effect, potentially inspiring copycat suicides by other disconsolate souls. “Just like that Matt fellow,” their friends would say, recalling the sudden head rush and chest tightening when they first heard the awful news.
Yes, the perfect suicide… though, in retrospect, what was I thinking?
I have an excuse. A very good excuse. I was not in my right mind when I came up with my air-tight departure plan. I was in the throes of grief, a caterwauling, miasmic grief, in the weeks following Nathaniel’s untimely passing. Officially, I’d been in love with Nathaniel for eight years but really since the first time I set eyes on him when I was nine years old and my brother, Ben, brought him home one weekend from college.

Nathaniel brought sense to my life. And shape. And context. Before him, living was nothing more than a jumble of days as disposable as the pages of an old calendar. There was no way I could face going back to that colorless existence. You know the gloomy, oppressive feeling you get when you have to return to your job the Monday morning after a life-altering vacation, one that expanded your view of the world? Well multiply that by ten and square it and you’ll only begin to comprehend how I felt when confronted by a post-Nathaniel world. The anxiety alone should have been enough to kill me.

A wise man once said that “losing love is like a window in your heart.” (Okay, so it was Paul Simon.) Still, the grieving process is a wrenching affair and one for which I was totally unprepared. It crept up on me suddenly just as the initial numbness of Nathaniel’s death was wearing off. Like a giant wave, it pulled me under only to ebb quickly and then, without warning, engulf me anew – hardly the best time to be making decisions about one’s future as a single man (as Christopher Isherwood once so tellingly depicted).

There is no proper way to prepare for bereavement. You can’t plan the day around it (Lunch, 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.; nervous breakdown, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.; dinner with friends 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.), or cram it into one marathon session like traffic school. It’s also difficult to predict what will trigger those unruly spasms of sobbing, self-pity and depression. Logically, you’d expect that one look at a beloved’s photo on the nightstand, Nathaniel’s golden smile in a matching frame, would be enough to get me going. Instead, it merely made me feel queasy, the same gut-churning nausea that overtook me whenever I heard myself talking about him in the past tense.
In a bizarre way, grief is like great sex, an all-consuming passion that takes possession of the body, complete with flailing and writhing, and refuses to loosen its grasp until it has been sated. And it’s just as exhausting but without the afterglow.

Is it any wonder then, that in the midst of all this, I decided that the only solution was to end it all and in the most spectacular manner imaginable? It was my subtle way of signaling to everyone around me that I was in pain, and when I’m in pain attention must be paid. Besides, how else could I hope to compete with Nathaniel’s abrupt exit during a game of touch football, when he dropped back, cupped his hands skyward towards a spiralling pigskin and slammed into a goalpost, severing his spine. One quick snap and it was over. If I didn’t come up with a high-drama exit strategy, I risked becoming merely a footnote in the story. (“Poor, wonderful Nathaniel. What a tragic loss. Oh yeah, and his lover, Matt, killed himself a few weeks later.”) Climax. Anti-climax.

When I first saw Nathaniel’s corpse lying on the schoolyard field, his eyes partially open, my initial reaction was “that’s not him, it’s a simulacrum.” Without breath and animation he resembled one of those celebrity impersonators or a Madame Tussaud waxwork. No, the real Nathaniel had been kidnapped without a ransom note and was being held against my will. That he was truly gone began to sink in slowly as friends congregated to mourn him and plan an elaborate (and fitting) memorial while I waited in vain for the kidnappers to call.

My unwillingness to slog on without Nathaniel will come as no surprise to anyone who truly cared about him and almost everybody did. I called him (damn you, past tense) the Pied Piper of Port Washington, but he cut a wider swath than that. He was one of those rare birds about whom nary a single unkind word was ever uttered, even behind his back. I don’t mean to suggest Nathaniel had no faults. But most of his shortcomings came complete with disarming self-deprecation. Nathaniel was the first to recognize and poke fun at his own foibles. I used to complain that it was hard to knock someone who always beats you to the punch, which annoyed him. But then he joked about being annoyed, making it impossible for me or anyone else to stay angry with him.

It’s funny the things we focus on when planning our own demise, which in my case included how the poor schnooks who stumbled on my lifeless carcass would react – the horror, the guilt, the recrimination. What a bizarre ego trip suicide can be. But I suppose that’s part of the allure. It’s the haymaker, the final scene of the tragedy in which the hero’s stunned friends gather over his mangled body and are ultimately moved to tears as the curtain falls.

The execution of this coup de grace required ingenuity and imagination. After all, when Juliet awakens to discover Romeo’s poisoned cold corpse beside her, she could hardly be expected to drink another potion. That would be redundant, unromantic and, frankly, just plain lazy. Instead, she unsheathes his dagger and plunges it into her breast, the perfect blood sacrifice to convey the depth of her sorrow.

Like Romeo and Juliet. That’s how I wanted us to be remembered, though I would have settled for Sid and Nancy. First Nathaniel dies in a freak accident and then Matt, in the throes of profound anguish, suffocates or succumbs to exposure – whichever came first – after sealing himself in the basement refrigerator. He is discovered naked, curled up like a fetal popsicle. Don’t laugh. Grief truly warps the mind.

My vehicle of transport to the beyond was a double-wide fridge of stainless steel and glass, the kind you find in the beverage section of a 7-Eleven (Brand name: Digby). John Clay, one of Nathaniel’s commercial real-estate clients who was going bankrupt, had given it to him a while back. “I’d rather you have it than my creditors,” Clay told him, which illustrates the effect Nathaniel had on people. Even as he was facing financial eclipse, Clay couldn’t resist the impulse to give Nathaniel a gift. Digby sat in our muggy, knotty pine-paneled basement, not an inch of which had been changed since the ’60s, stacked with beers and soft drinks of every color we could find for our weekly pinochle nights. Yes, pinochle – sometimes, two-handed – and on occasion, canasta. Anyone can do poker or bridge.
The idea to entomb myself inside an industrial-size refrigerator came to me in a demented flash during one of my crying jags. I was stumbling around the basement sobbing and slurping down shots of Southern Comfort with beer chasers and listening to the plaintive wailings of The Smiths: Morrissey during his neediest period (“And heaven knows I’m miserable now”), when I arrived at the somewhat prosaic conclusion that “life is no longer worth living” and its equally trite companion “I can’t go on this way.” Through a blur of saline and streaming mucus, there stood Digby, his cold white lights staring at me like a fatal temptation. I conjured the image of my naked body immured in glass and steel, my chilled skin a blue-veined alabaster with twin icicle trails of tears dangling from my eyelids. Creepy and at the same time captivating, almost like a work of art, the bastard child of David Blaine and George Segal (the sculptor, not the actor).

Only a tortured soul who also happens to be stinking drunk would consider this a foolproof escape plan. Methodically, I emptied Digby out, lining the beers and soft drinks in neat rows on the linoleum, sorting them by label. I suppose I went to all this trouble for the same reason that people put on clean underwear before they jump in front of a bus. With great difficulty – and a screwdriver – I removed the shelves. Stripping down, I carefully folded my clothes, laid them on the card table and climbed in.

Here’s where my nifty little scheme began to go awry. I couldn’t quite get the doors shut. No matter how I contorted myself, there was always a wayward limb or buttock. I had miscalculated Digby’s depth and height, and even in my pronounced state of inebriation I grasped that if I couldn’t close the doors tightly, suffocation was not an option. Another hitch: the doors opened outward and there was no inside latch.

The second alternative, death by exposure, would take far too long, especially given the level of alcohol in my blood and Digby’s mediocre cooling mechanism, another factor I should have taken into consideration before emptying him and dismantling his innards.

Knee-deep in misery and self-reproach, I threw myself onto the scratchy wool basement sofa and contemplated a bleak future filled with sadness and memories of Nathaniel, made all the more painful by the realization that there would be no further memories of him, someone who’d been a vital part of my life since the day he walked through the front door of our house trailing Ben.

Ben had come home for Easter recess during his freshman year at Penn. With that petulant scowl on his face, he brusquely introduced Nathaniel to my mother, who giggled demurely and, rather oddly, curtsied. “So you’re the great Nathaniel my Ben just can’t stop talking about,” she said in some inexplicable Southern drawl like she was channeling Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. Ben shifted nervously from foot to foot and forced his mouth into a pained smile, which made him look like a jack-o’-lantern. Then, without so much as a glance in my direction, he flipped his hand and blurted, “Oh yeah, and that’s the kid.” Ben never referred to me by name. It was always the kid, the brat, and when he was really cross, fuckface.

When I looked up at Nathaniel, I couldn’t quite make him out. His head was tilted away from me, so all I saw was this long neck and squared-off chin. Then he pivoted gracefully on his right foot and bent over at the waist until we were face to face. Separately, his features were somewhat exaggerated: a wide mouth with a droopy lower lip; a long, skinny Russian nose with two ski bumps and slightly flattened at the tip; flying saucer ears, and oval, jade-green eyes trimmed with impossibly long silver lashes recessed under a protruding brow – all of it surrounded by a halo of strawberry curls that, over the years, gradually relaxed and darkened to the color of caramel toffee. When you put all the pieces together, however, he was stunning and his face glowed with an inner energy that was apparent even when he said something as simple as “Hey, kid.”

And there was something else I picked up on, though at the time I couldn’t possibly have put it into words: a strain of Slavic melancholy that grounded him and gave him emotional heft.

I’m not certain when I took my next breath, but the moment remains fixed in time like an artifact preserved in amber. Only one other memory from my childhood is as vivid, in a completely different way, and that was the time Tommy Horchow pitched me high during a game of stickball and popped me right between the eyes. I don’t remember it happening, only seeing stars (yeah, stars!) and waking up on the curb with my mother pressing a cold cloth against my forehead. The impact was exactly the same, except I didn’t have a headache for two days after meeting Nathaniel.

He and my brother spent the Easter recess cruising around town in Nathaniel’s refurbished eggplant-colored ’57 Plymouth convertible or in Ben’s bedroom blasting the stereo behind closed doors. From my room on the other side of the wall, I absorbed the muffled vibrations of the Stones, Cream and Zeppelin, and – new to me – the voices of their progenitors, the holy trinity of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. My tin-eared brother, who thought Howlin’ Wolf and Wolfman Jack were the same person, pretended to groove on it all, but I’m sure it was only to impress Nathaniel. What a wiener. After they went back to school, I snuck in and borrowed the LPs from Ben’s room, which were off limits to me, and I could soon croon passing fair Long Island white-boy renditions of “Kindhearted Woman Blues” and “Spoonful,” though the world is a better place for my “Hoochie Coochie Man” never having made it beyond the confines of the shower stall.

When Nathaniel visited throughout Ben’s junior and senior years, we rarely spoke. I mostly shadowed him from the periphery, quietly feasting on his opinions about music, literature (Roth, si, Vonnegut no; Kerouac, self-indulgent and undisciplined; Ginsburg, heady), movies (Bergman, overrated; Godard, pedantic and bourgeois; Truffaut, Rossellini, Visconti, Ford and Welles, all sublime) and politics (the implacability of America’s ruling class and how it has undermined the possibility of true Democracy). The little I actually grasped was thrilling. But what most impressed me was his sense of humor. There was an artful rhythm to Nathaniel’s lengthy anecdotes. They built slowly as he drew together seemingly unrelated snippets of information, eventually dovetailing, and concluding with a deliberately tossed away capper or punch line. His stories induced not just chuckles, but doubled-over holding-your-stomach howls. Nathaniel was gifted with the impeccable timing of a true raconteur which cannot and, moreover, should not be attempted by amateurs. Whenever I was dumb enough to repeat one of his gems, I was usually met with blank stares and, a couple of times, alarm.

Part of my fascination with Nathaniel, I suppose, was latent sexual yearning. Or maybe not so latent since, early on I knew I was a ’mo in the making, even if I wasn’t quite sure what that actually meant, except for thinking that boys were more interesting than girls – though I guess most straight guys do too. But there was also a sincere desire to actually get into Nathaniel’s skin, to wrap it around me like a shaman wearing the pelt of a sacred animal and attempting to inhabit the beast’s spirit. I’d never met anyone who took such exquisite pleasure in being himself as if at birth he’d been given a choice of identities and, without a moment’s hesitation, proclaimed, “Oh, Nathaniel, definitely, that’s who I want to be,” a decision he never for one moment regretted. The Nathaniel I fell in love with as an adult proved to be plagued by many of the same doubts and insecurities as the rest of us, but even then he coped with grace.

Abruptly, the winter after Ben graduated, Nathaniel disappeared from my life. My brother moved on to Yale Law and his friendship with Nathaniel was replaced by serial relationships with a long line of almost-but-not-quite fiancées, pretty much the same cute, fair-haired, slim-hipped shiksa, with vaguely the same name – Mandy, Sandy, Trish, Trudy.

Nathaniel, I later learned, had moved to Manhattan where he got involved in commercial real estate. After knowing her for just a few months, he proposed to a woman improbably named Rosalinda. “I married a girl out of a Springsteen song,” he used to laugh. The union was short-lived and soon after his divorce, he threw himself a huge coming-out party, it being the ’70s and New York and all.

At about the same time, I was battling puberty, the Creator’s idea of a really sick joke. Tell me, why acne? And what’s with the freak show aspects like various parts of the body growing at different rates? For the longest time, I remained five foot two with short, slightly stubby legs as my arms shot out simian-like from my shoulders. Until I was 17 and my legs finally grew under me, I resembled a chimpanzee with zits. I have pictures.
Shortly after my 15th birthday, my mother succumbed to a second bout of breast cancer. Dad was living on the other coast with wife number two or three by then, and I guess she laid down the law because I was soon tossed from the frying pan into a boarding school in Colorado, the notorious Willow Ridge. Put 700 hormonally enraged teenage boys on a remote mountaintop and you get more perverts – not a word I toss around casually, mind you – per square inch than anywhere outside of a federal penitentiary. Think “The Shining” with perpetual hard-ons.

For a time, I kept the priapic sociopaths at bay by blasting Tom Waits, Patti Smith and very late Miles Davis (from his really irritating druggie phase) on my stereo or retreating into dark corners and trying to appear very mysterious, by which I mean devoting myself to the works of Conan Doyle, Christie, Chandler, Hammett, and (my favorite) Highsmith. But I soon realized that, as in prison, the best way to keep from being serially assaulted, especially during the cabin fever months, was to seek out an intimidating patron. Harold had football field-wide shoulders and could be fearsome, though at heart he was one of the gentlest souls I’ve ever known. He said he liked to “bunk” with me because I was “exotic.” I never asked him to elaborate. He’s married now, has three kids and lives in Bakersfield. Sends the same Christmas card every year – a snowy Nativity scene. The word Christmas is crossed out and what I’m sure is supposed to be Chanukah is scribbled in. Anyway, it’s the thought that counts.
College (Vassar) was pretty uneventful after that: freedom, boyfriends, heartache and no idea what to do with a liberal arts degree after graduation.

Cut to the night of June 24, 1983, which for me exists in the eternal present. I am working on my master’s degree in education, which will eventually lead to an illustrious career teaching second grade in the Long Island Public School system. At the time, however, I envisioned a more prestigious future in academia, tooling around the quad in tweeds redolent of honey-scented pipe tobacco in the company of adoring young men hanging on my every word.

It’s a Friday night and I’m on the prowl. (Not to worry, after one painful dose of the clap at 17, I never again left home without a sheaf of raincoats.) The time is approximately 10:30. I’m playing pinball and nursing an Amstel at the Hammer in upper Manhattan, one of those sawdust-on-the-floor bars with a strictly disco-diva juke box favoring the likes of Thelma Houston, Gloria Gaynor and Evelyn “Champagne” King, whose “Shame” is currently holding court. I happen to glance down the bar where I see a dead ringer for Nathaniel hunched somberly over a margarita and completely lose interest in pinball.

I tell myself, Matt, stop. Nathaniel is not gay. Besides, this guy’s hair is shorter, darker, straighter, and he’s heavier, though in all the right places. For the record, I should mention that I had only fixated on Nathaniel intermittently since I last saw him and then only as an idealized fantasy figure. We all have one of those lying around somewhere in our unconscious. I just don’t want to give the impression that I’d been harboring some twisted slasher-pic obsession.

I walk back and forth along the bar until I’m reasonably certain it’s not his doppelganger. Even then I hesitate. What if Nathaniel’s not out yet and freaks because I’ve recognized him? What if he blows me off, brusquely or – worse – tactfully with big globs of pity in his eyes? Ouch! What if everything I admired about him was merely a childhood delusion and he’s actually a raging asshole? Look out for falling idols! But if I don’t make my move now, he might just get up and leave or – worse, given how unbelievably yummy he is – start talking to someone else.

Fortunately, melancholy has cast a spell over him this evening and he is remote and inaccessible. The stool beside him becomes vacant. In my haste to claim it, I slip on the sawdust and nearly break my neck. Then, after I catch my breath, for the first time in my life, I say something completely idiotic that miraculously comes out totally right. “Nathaniel, would you mind terribly if I held your hand?”

He looks over and tilts his head back slowly. I notice the onset of a bemused grin. His eyes are saying, “I don’t know who you are, but there is something familiar about you so, okay, I’ll play along.” He reaches out, clasps my sweaty palm and lifts my elbow onto the bar as if we were preparing to arm wrestle. The heat of his hand and the strength of his grip almost make me swoon, and I’m not an easy swoon. He pulls closer, chuckles, and shakes his head. He still can’t make the connection: a former trick, an old business acquaintance?

“I’m sorry. If I’d met you before, I don’t think I’d forget,” he says. How is it possible for one person to always know the perfect thing to say in any given situation? It’s like he has a team of the best writers on call in his brain 24/7.

When I tell him who I am, he shakes his head and exclaims, “Wow! Really?” He gives me the full-body scan, head to toe, looking for some remnants of “the kid.” At the same time, he is seriously checking me out. Without letting go of my hand, he says, “Let’s go somewhere, Matthew.”
I assume this means unbridled, passionate sex until dawn. I follow him in my car all the way back to Long Island. I’m guessing that we’re spending the night at my place. He pulls into one of those harshly lit 24-hour diners where we play catch-up. Ben is mentioned only in passing to confirm that, indeed, he and Nathaniel drifted apart as college buddies sometimes do, especially when one of them is closet jumping. When he asks after my brother, I say that I rarely see him, what with the grueling hours he puts in at that stick-up-the-ass Manhattan law firm he works for and his serial girlfriends. And anyway, we were never really close.

Nathaniel sketches out the details of his failed marriage. It was Rosalinda who broke the news that he was gay and should stop wasting her time and his own. They separated amicably and he engaged in a noble struggle between coming out and becoming a full-fledged alcoholic. “I know some guys can do both, but I lose focus when I try to do more than one thing at a time,” he says. He has recently moved to Port Washington, where he’s supervising renovations on a fixer-upper his grandfather left him, a large, rambling three-story clapboard with a wraparound porch which he is painting forest green with the palest lilac trim. He’s thinking of maybe living there when it’s finished.

When it’s my turn, I do my best to amuse him – okay, impress him – by cherry-picking the most lurid episodes from my years under lock and key at Willow Ridge, tales of messy teenage lust in close quarters. He seems keenly interested, even tickled. Either that or he’s just feigning interest because he’s projecting forward to when we’re both naked and rolling around playing pretend wrestling. (I’m entitled to my fantasies, thank you.) As we both start to wilt under the combined weight of beer, the diner’s interrogation-room fluorescent lighting and our biological clocks (it’s almost four a.m.), he lets go an enormous yawn and says “Matthew, my man. I’m beat. Time to call it a night.”

What I hear is rejection and the butterflies of anticipation in my stomach collide and collapse into a heap. His intentions are strictly honorable, dammit. Or maybe I’m getting the brush-off because he still sees me as Ben’s kid brother. Worse, he considers me a flighty party boy and is trying to get away as quickly as possible without appearing rude. That’s the trouble with born charmers. They can totally snow you and still you blame yourself.

Nathaniel reads my disappointment. I’m a terrible actor – Pauly Shore terrible. He leans over and daubs a kiss across my cheek. “Let’s continue with this tomorrow night over dinner.” That’s what he said. I remember it distinctly. Not, “Are you free sometime for dinner?” or “If you’re not too busy tomorrow chasing tail…”

My first impulse is to yell, “Oh boy, you bet!” Instead, I take a deep breath and say, “Sure. I don’t have any plans” with just the right touch of blasé. Then I remember that tomorrow night is Saturday. Dork. Well, too late to take it back now.

We shake hands in the parking lot and glance back at each other as we get into our cars. On the drive home, I give myself a thorough reality check: Look here, mister, you’re getting way ahead of yourself. Dinner may just mean dinner. So stop acting like a bobbysoxer at a Sinatra concert. Or he may want to feed you, bed you and send you on your way. What of it? For all you know he’s a total dud in the sack, has intimacy issues, or is consumed with self-loathing. You name it, you’ve dated it.

By the time I get home, I’m completely sober and calm. I do not sleep a wink.

As I dressed for our date, I promised myself I was not going to fall apart if he expressed no interest in an after-dinner brandy and some fellatio. Since it was unofficially a first date, it was important not to pounce or he’d think I was immature or – worse – wanton. If all went well and he asked me out again, I’d casually accept. And then, if he still didn’t put out, swallow hard and quickly shift gears into let’s-just-be-friends.

Four dates later – wonderful evenings, lots of laughs and never a single uncomfortable lapse in conversation though, for the life of me, I can’t remember a single thing we discussed – we were nestled in the back row of a movie theater. Again, I have no idea what we went to see largely because we were so busy making out and groping one another like love-starved teenagers. All that was missing was a popcorn tub with a false bottom. Then he excused himself to go to the men’s room and didn’t come back. After waiting impatiently for a full half hour, I found him in the parking lot walking around in circles. What followed was a display of Matt’s homegrown fireworks: not pretty. But very noisy.

Nathaniel reacted like I’d shot his dog. When I finally ran out of cherry bombs, he said quietly, “I think I’m falling in love with you. And that’s kinda’ new and scary for me.” Now it was my turn to be stunned into silence, which he interpreted as indifference.

Perhaps I should explain. All the pre-adolescent fantasies I’d harbored for Nathaniel were largely hero worship. He, hero; me, worshipper. I was still woefully immature and groin-centric, so it was hard for me to think much past a satisfying roll in the hay or a torrid too-hot-not-to-cool-down affair that would end disastrously, as they always do. When he said “falling in love,” I suddenly came down with a bad case of “Oh my god, he thinks of me as an adult and now I have to behave like one.” We all say we want to be treated like grown-ups. We rarely mean it.

No words were exchanged on the ride home and I ran out of the car without even saying goodnight.

The next three weeks were torture, yank-out-the-fingernails torture. Like a little brat who claims he wants his parents to stop infantilizing him, I became indignant and childish. Who the hell does Nathaniel think he is saying he’s in love with me? Malarkey. I know when I’m being set up for the big fall. Unlike in the movies, love doesn’t always lift you up into the ether. Because it’s the exception and not the rule, your initial inclination is to build ramparts, not let down the drawbridge. I resolved to move past Nathaniel. Nathaniel? Nathaniel who? Shifting deftly into self-preservation mode, I chose to distract myself with any number of willing candidates. One night, after an extended and what I would categorize as a more than satisfactory encounter, I abruptly kicked the unsuspecting schmuck out, sucked down two whiskeys, neat, and at around 3 a.m. dialed Nathaniel’s number and confessed to his Mr. Rogers-like voice recording: “I just called to say that this is unchartered territory for me too.”

There is nothing more terrifying than hearing the sound of your own vulnerability surrounded by silence. As I was hanging up, there was a slight click on the other end and some fumbling with the receiver. After what seemed like two and a half years, I heard a groggy rasp: “I understand.”

“Next step?” I ventured, knees knocking together.

“We run the risk of being totally devastated.”

“Right now that would be an improvement for me.”

“Ditto.”

I love that he said “ditto.”

“How about we get together for breakfast?” I asked.

“What time?”

“Now.”

“Where?”

“You know.”

I love that he knew exactly where “you know” was. When I arrived at the diner, he was sitting at a table in the window under a glaring neon sign waiting for me.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the cold asphyxiation plan went kerflooey for reasons beyond my singular ineptitude. The memories Nathaniel and I shared were still too alive and pungent to die with me. They put up a valiant struggle and won. After that, my subsequent decision to take a sabbatical and traipse off to Eastern Europe in the middle of winter to claim an unexpected inheritance sounded almost rational by comparison. All I had to do was show up in person. I mean, what could be easier?

Author’s note: Matthew’s dicey adventures in the recently liberated Soviet satellite and his discovery of a journal detailing a decades-long clandestine love affair are the basis of the novel-in-progress Café Eisenhower, of which the above story constitutes the first chapter.