It was the stories that first made her look at me. They intrigued her; she recognized them as a hideout. The first weeks she made me tell her every story I could dream up. Except the real one. She only let me tell her the real yarn a long time later, after I had the key to her apartment. We still lie around in bed and she makes me tell a story. She always acts as if she believed the story. I suppose because she knows that, in a way, I almost believe them myself. Why not? As Marty says, what is true when you come down to it? Especially what is really true that we tell, or know, about ourselves?
‘Jo-Jo has no troubles,’ I said. ‘Not to hear Petey Vitanza tell it, and not that I can find.’
‘A good boy who saves his money, has ambition, and works hard,’ Marty said. She sipped her martini. ‘But he’s run, and his father tries to beat you to stop you finding him.’
‘To stop me from even looking,’ I said. ‘There’s a difference. He wants me to stop looking.’
‘No one knows everything about someone else,’ Marty said. ‘This Jo-Jo is in trouble the Vitanza boy doesn’t know about.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but what?’
‘Look at his dream and his family,’ Marty said. ‘One or the other, and sometimes both. You take me, Dan. Sixteen and a lush for a mother, and the college boys treated me like dirt because I was a town girl and not sorority. I decided to be free and famous. A hundred-to-one it’s the family.’
‘Patrolman Stettin is in it somewhere,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’