“I’d get you some diapers,” she says, not cracking a smile.

“And then I’d stick your butt in boiling water a couple of times.

That’d help you remember.”

I laugh, knowing Amy is okay about the carpet if she can joke with me.

“See, Jessie,” I say, leaning over to inspect a small raw spot on her leg, “there are ways to get your attention.” “Not hers,” Amy says pointedly.

“Yours.”

I glance around her apartment and am reminded how little we have in common. Besides the age difference, Amy and I have radically different tastes. When she decorated my office she toned down the art she selected, but on display in her apartment, a two-bedroom in a gray brick structure just off the Wilbur Mills freeway, are drawings, paintings, and photographs, rarely, if ever, seen in a state where most of the inhabitants (myself included) are more at ease with art done by the numbers in Norman Rockwell style. Here, Amy has just redone her apartment by hanging life-size nudes on all the walls. A couple of men, too-one, a guy with a penis the size of a boa constrictor that has just finished a good lunch.

This new phase is weird and embarrassing. I look up at a photograph of a Marilyn Monroe lookalike on the opposite wall. She has a safety pin running through her left nipple.

“What does it make you feel?” she asked me when I saw this particular photo for the first time. Nausea, I whispered, fascinated even as my scrotum tried to retract inside my body. I’m all for having my consciousness raised, but does it have to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job?

“What does your mother think about this stuff?” I ask tonight. I can’t imagine having friends over for dinner and having them try to pretend they aren’t dying to get home so they can get on the phone and gossip about the horror show on Amy and Gideon’s walls.