Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other I said, more or less: It's the beginning of the summer and I'm standing in the lobby of a thousand, story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless red row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. I was nervous and drank more than I ate my father carefully dispatched his steak. "Sure," I said, and I thought for a second about Uncle Lenny, juggling three sandwich halves in the back room of his five-and-dime in the Hill District a million years ago. "I saw Lenny Stem this morning," he said. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom. But Claire had moved out the month before. We'd just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will-a year I'd spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him. At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business.
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