Adam (“red clay”) wept over a newspaper article about the birthday of Tai Shan (“peaceful mountain”), the new panda cub at the National Zoo. I told Adam he was kind of like a woman. I’ll take that in the spirit in which I believe it was meant, he said. I meant he was sensitive and liked to talk, and he was even more google-eyed around kids than I was, and I was getting bad about it. For example, it was hard for me to keep reading once the young couple brought that baby into the coffee shop, that baby in a petal pink jumpsuit.

II. My Buddy

Even the loud grabby kids at the coffee shop, the whiny ones at the supermarket, I couldn’t help watching them, watching the mom or dad’s frazzled invisible love tangles follow their kids, love their kids even while wanting to stuff them in one of the tall coolers of chicken nuggets and frozen pies. At the supermarket I saw a middle-aged man in glasses, a fishing hat, and knee socks, with a doll dressed just like him, My Buddy-style, in a pack on his chest. Standing at the checkout, I knew that I was part of this man, and he was part of me. I wanted to follow him and his doll; instead I fumbled for my credit card. The man in glasses hunched to examine the Halloween candy display. He held the doll’s face close to the boxes. The doll was also nearsighted.

Children screamed through the supermarket. I pictured myself a plodding earth mother, round and expectant, rosy and fecund and strewing petals down the cereal aisle to prepare the way for my firstborn. Strange thoughts were taking over, they were camping out and getting comfortable, they were squatting in the furrows of my brain, building little thought-tarp villages, they were setting up for a little thought-music festival and the jam bands were doing sound checks and the industrious ones were weaving thought-hemp jewelry to sell for gas money home, and of course I love music too and I believe in freedom and I didn’t have the heart to chase them out. The thoughts suggested I carry around a doll for practice. I could latch her on my back with a big batik wrap. One thing for sure: I’d get a wide berth at the supermarket.

III. Our Flayed Lord

If I say museums were a locus amoenus for Adam and me, I don’t mean sweaty experimental trysts on priceless carpets but rather the electric pleasures of catching his hand, a quick kiss on the neck when no one was looking. One Saturday we spooled down the Guggenheim and blushed among Aztec artifacts. A clay and pigment Xipe Totec (“our lord the flayed one”), ruler of the west, disease, spring, goldsmiths and the seasons, watched our ignition. Xipe Totec is flayed and covered with his own skin. Without skin, Xipe Totec is gold.

IV. Hand and Name

I don’t know all the available phenotypes for Jewishness, but I have learned that I am not any of them. In Israel, I dodged the light of the white stone, the gold glare from the Dome of the Rock. Adam smoothed the lumpy blue kipa on his head. He said everyone could read him: American Jew, not observant. I added: holding hands with a gentile.

At the museum Yad Vashem (“Hand/Memorial and Name”), the last, lofty rooms inhale after the cramped exhibits of ghettoes and railcars. Adam wandered through the Hall of Names, the crescendo before the museum’s Zionist climax: a balcony and a panorama of Jerusalem. I stood in a room full of light and photographs of survivors’ young families. I looked at those women, the tensile strength of their flesh. Bend the body as close as you can to death, and sometimes it still bends back.

V. Beautiful Song

Adam flashed slides from the excavated projector: a shot of alligators framed by a glass-bottom boat, a cabin at the beach, Adam’s mother, Carolyn (“beautiful song”), in a green headscarf after chemotherapy. Those were dark times, he said, looking at the light of his dead mother splayed across the wall.

Adam wept, and I slipped my hand onto his heart. He carried grief that I felt like a grief-suit on my skin. He said, I haven’t looked at pictures of my mother in a long time.