Then I remembered the notebook. It didn’t feel right to open the Moleskine naked. So I put my underwear back on. And my shirt (unbuttoned). And my pants.

Lily deserved some respect, after all.

It pretty much blew me away, what she had written. Especially the part about Franny. Because I’d always had a soft spot for Franny. Like most of Salinger’s characters, she wouldn’t be such a fuckup, you felt, if these fucked-up things didn’t keep happening to her. I mean, you never wanted her to end up with Lane, who was a douche bag, only without the vinegar. If she ended up going to Yale, you wanted her to burn the place down.

I knew I was starting to confuse Lily with Franny. Only, Lily wouldn’t fall for Lane. She’d fall for … Well, I had no idea who she’d fall for, or if he happened to resemble me.

We believe in the wrong things, I wrote, using the same pen Boomer had used on his arm. That’s what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We’re just so damn good at reading them wrong.

I wanted to stop there. But I went on.

It’s not going to be explained to you in a prayer. And I’m not going to be able to explain it to you. Not just because I’m as ignorant and hopeful and selectively blind as the next guy, but because I don’t think meaning is something that can be explained. You have to understand it on your own. It’s like when you’re starting to read. First, you learn the letters. Then, once you know what sounds the letters make, you use them to sound out words. You know that c-a-t leads to cat and d-o-g leads to dog. But then you have to make that extra leap, to understand that the word, the sound, the “cat” is connected to an actual cat, and that “dog” is connected to an actual dog. It’s that leap, that understanding, that leads to meaning. And a lot of the time in life, we’re still just sounding things out. We know the sentences and how to say them. We know the ideas and how to present them. We know the prayers and which words to say in what order. But that’s only spelling.

I don’t mean this to sound hopeless. Because in the same way that a kid can realize what “c-a-t” means, I think we can find the truths that live behind our words. I wish I could remember the moment when I was a kid and I discovered that the letters linked into words, and that the words linked to real things. What a revelation that must have been. We don’t have the words for it, since we hadn’t yet learned the words. It must have been astonishing, to be given the key to the kingdom and see it turn in our hands so easily.

My hands were starting to shake a little. Because I hadn’t known that I knew these things. Just having a notebook to write them in, and having someone to write them to, made them all rise to the surface.

There was the other part of it, too—the I want to believe there is a somebody out there just for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody. That was, I had to admit, less a concern to me. Because the rest of it seemed so much bigger. But I still had enough longing for that concept that I didn’t want to dispel it completely. Meaning: I didn’t want to tell Lily that I felt we’d all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soulmate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine.

Too much. Too soon. Too fast. I put down the notebook, paced around the apartment. The world was too full of wastrels and waifs, sycophants and spies—all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect. Perhaps this was what was so unnerving about Lily at this moment—the trust that was required in what we were doing.

It is much harder to lie to someone’s face.

But.

It is also much harder to tell the truth to someone’s face.

Words failed me, insofar as I wasn’t sure I could find the words that wouldn’t fail her. So I put the journal down and pondered the address she’d given me (I had no idea where Dyker Heights was) and the ghastly Muppet that had accompanied it. Do bring Snarly Muppet, she’d written. I liked the ring of the do bring. Like this was a comedy of manners.

“Can you tell me what she’s like?” I asked Snarly.

He just snarled back. Not helpful.

My cell phone rang—Mom, asking me how Christmas Eve at Dad’s place was. I told her it was fine and asked her if she and Giovanni were having a traditional Christmas Eve dinner. She giggled and said no, there wasn’t a turkey in sight, and she was just fine with that. I liked the sound of her giggle—kids don’t really hear their parents giggle enough, if you ask me—and I let her get off the phone before she felt the urge to pass it over to Giovanni for some perfunctory salutations. I knew my dad wouldn’t call until actual Christmas Day—he only called when the obligation was so obvious even a gorilla would get it.

I imagined what it would be like if my lie to my mom was actually the truth—that is, if I was with Dad and Leeza right then, at some “yoga retreat” in California. Personally, I felt yoga was something to retreat from, not toward, so the mental image involved me sitting cross-legged with an open book in my lap while everyone else did the Spread-Eagle Ostrich. I’d vacationed with Dad and Leeza exactly once in the two or so years they’d been together, and that had involved a redundantly named “spa resort” and me walking in on them while they were kissing with mud masks on. That had been more than enough for this lifetime, and the three or four after.

Mom and I had decorated the tree before she and Giovanni had left. Even though I wasn’t into Christmas, I did get some satisfaction from the tree—every year, Mom and I got to take out our childhoods and scatter them across the branches. I hadn’t said anything, but Mom had known that Giovanni deserved no part in this—it was just her and me, taking out the palm-sized rocking chair that my great-grandmother had made for my mother’s dollhouse and dangling it from a bow, then taking the worn-out washcloth from when I was a baby, its lion face still peering through the cartoon woods, and balancing it on the pine. Every year we added something, and this year I’d made my mother laugh when I’d brought out one of my younger self’s most prized possessions—a mini Canadian Club bottle that she’d drained quickly on a flight to see my paternal grandparents, and that I’d then proceeded to hold (in amazement) for the rest of the vacation.

It was a funny story, and I wanted to tell it to Lily, the girl I barely knew.

But I left the notebook where it was. I knew I could have buttoned my shirt, put my shoes back on, and headed to the mysterious Dyker Heights. But my gift to myself this Christmas Eve was a full retreat from the world. I didn’t turn on the TV. I didn’t call any friends. I didn’t check my email. I didn’t even look out the windows. Instead, I reveled in solitude. If Lily wanted to believe there was a somebody out there just for her, I wanted to believe that I could be somebody in here just for me. I made myself dinner. I ate slowly, trying to take the time to actually taste the food. I picked up Franny and Zooey and enjoyed their company again. Then I tangoed with my bookshelf, dipping in and out again, in and out again—a Marie Howe poem, then a John Cheever story. An old E. B. White essay, then a passage from Trumpet of the Swans. I went into my mother’s room and read some of the pages she’d dog-eared—she always did that when she read a sentence that she liked, and each time I opened the book, I had to try to figure out which sentence was the one that had impressed itself upon her. Was it the Logan Pearsall Smith quote “The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star” from page 202 of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar or, a few lines down, the more simple “Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around”? From Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, was it “He had admired the ancient delicacy of the buildings and the way the street lamps made soft explosions of light green in the trees at night” or “The place had filled him with a sense of wisdom hovering just out of reach, of unspeakable grace prepared and waiting just around the corner, but he’d walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves”? On page 82 of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, was it “But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.” Or was it “I think I am ready for that now. I think I am ready to be met”?

I spent hours doing this. I didn’t say a word, but I wasn’t conscious of my silence. The sound of my own life, my own internal life, was all that I needed.

It felt like a holiday, but that had nothing to do with Jesus or the calendar or what anyone else in the world was doing.

Before I went to bed, I got back into my usual routine—opening up the (sadly, abridged) dictionary next to my bed and trying to find a word I could love.

li•ques•cent, adj. 1. becoming liquid; melting. 2. tending toward a liquid state.
Liquescent. I tried to say myself to sleep with it.

It was only as I was drifting off that I realized what I’d done: In opening the book at random, I’d only landed a few pages long of Lily.

I hadn’t left any milk and cookies out for Santa. We didn’t have a chimney; there wasn’t even a fireplace. I had submitted no list, and had not received any certifications of my niceness. And yet, when I woke up around noon the next day, there were still presents from my mother waiting for me.

I unwrapped them one by one underneath the tree, since I knew that was how she’d want me to do it. I felt pangs for her then—just for these ten minutes, just so I could give her presents, too. There wasn’t anything surprising beneath the wrapping paper—a number of books I’d wanted, a gadget or two to add some diversity, and a blue sweater that didn’t look half bad.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said to the air. Because it was still too early to call her time zone.

I lost myself immediately in one of the books, only emerging when the phone rang.

“Dashiell?” my father intoned. As if someone else with my voice might be answering the phone at my mother’s apartment.

“Yes, Father?”

“Leeza and I would like to wish you a merry Christmas.”

“Thank you, Father. And to you, as well.”

[awkward pause]

[even more awkward pause]

“I hope your mother isn’t giving you any trouble.”

Oh, Father, I love it when you play this game.

“She told me if I clean all the ashes out of the grate, then I’ll be able to help my sisters get ready for the ball.”

“It’s Christmas, Dashiell. Can’t you give that attitude a rest?”

“Merry Christmas, Dad. And thanks for the presents.”

“What presents?”

“I’m sorry—those were all from Mom, weren’t they?”

“Dashiell …”

“I gotta go. The gingerbread men are on fire.”

“Wait—Leeza wants to wish you a merry Christmas.”

“The smoke’s getting pretty thick. I really have to go.”

“Well, merry Christmas.”

“Yeah, Dad. Merry Christmas.”

It was, I figured, at least an eighth my fault for picking up the phone in the first place. But I’d just wanted to get it over with, and now here it was—very over. I gravitated toward the red notebook and almost started venting there—but then I felt like I didn’t want to burden Lily with what I was feeling, not right now. That would just be passing the unfairness along, and Lily would be even more powerless to stop what had happened than I had been.