Characters in The Things They Left Behind

I remembered Bruce Mason asking me if it didn’t look like an enema bag for elfs—“elfs,” he said—and by a process of association remembered that the conch shell had been his. Of course. Bruce Mason, Lord of the Flies.

Ditto Cleve Farrell’s Claims Adjustor. (“Besboll been bery-bery good to mee,” Cleve would sometimes say, waving the bat over his head as he sat at his desk.

… appointment was a receptionist who told me that Dr. Jauss might be able to work me in the following January. She intimated even that would take some inspired shoehorning. The others held out no hope whatsoever. I tried half a dozen therapists in Newark and four in White Plains, even …

Edward, that’s his name. Over the last two years he’s been in Europe more than he’s here, and although I don’t like it, I’m very married in spite of it.” Then, as a kind of afterthought, she added: “Edward is in import-export.”

Then he tried to show Freddy Lounds how to do it. The best Freddy had been able to muster was a series of weak honking sounds like . . . well, like Jimmy Eagleton’s Farting Cushion. Around and around it goes. Ultimately, every associative chain forms a necklace.

… to ring once because I’d called ahead and Janice Mason was expecting me. I had my story carefully prepared and told it with some confidence, knowing that the taxi sitting in the driveway, its meter running, would forestall any detailed cross-examination. On September seventh, I said—the Friday before—I had tried …

The Farting Cushion had belonged to Jimmy Eagleton and got a certain amount of play every year at the Christmas party. The ceramic Alice had been on Maureen Hannon’s desk—a gift from her granddaughter, she’d told me once.

The ceramic Alice had been on Maureen Hannon’s desk—a gift from her granddaughter, she’d told me once. Maureen had the most beautiful white hair, which she wore long, to her waist.

… The guy in the cubicle next to mine, Misha Bryzinski, had kept a small pair of Punch and Judy dolls on his desk. The one I spied under my sofa with my little eye was Punch. Judy was nowhere to be found, but Punch was enough for me. Those black …

… be Jimmy Eagleton’s Farting Cushion—I could hardly tell Mrs. Eagleton I’d brought it home for the weekend in order to practice using it, could I? But necessity is the mother of invention, and I was confident that I would eventually think of some halfway plausible story. It occurred to me …

… most of them not long after I helped Paula Robeson with her air conditioner. Memory always needs a marker, and that’s mine. She was a children’s book illustrator, good-looking (hell, fine-looking), husband in import-export. A man has a way of remembering occasions when he’s actually able to help a good-looking …

• • • Four floors down, Pedro the doorman was standing in the shade of the awning and talking with Rafe the FedEx man.

My sister Peg was currently living in Cleveland, where she had embraced Mary Kay cosmetics, the Indians, and fundamentalist Christianity, not necessarily in that order.

… the shade of the awning and talking with Rafe the FedEx man. Pedro was a serious hardboy when it came to letting deliverymen stand in front of the building—he had a seven-minute rule, a pocket watch with which to enforce it, and all the beat cops were his buddies—but he …

… Lucite cube with the steel penny in it: Roland Abelson, in Liability. He called it his retirement fund. It was Roland who had a habit of saying “Lucy, you got some ’splainin to do.” One night in the fall of ’01, I had seen his widow on the six o’clock …

“Last one no good?” asked Rose Ming, at the cash register. She spoke with some concern. “You tell why.” “No, the last one was fine,” I said. “Tonight I just felt like two.” She laughed as though this were the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and I laughed, too. Hard.

… On an afternoon about a week after Sir Scott Staley donned his Good Samaritan armor and successfully battled the fearsome air conditioner, I took my afternoon walk to the Staples on 83rd Street to get a box of Zip discs and a ream of paper. I owed a fellow forty …

… could think of, which was to grab up Sonja D’Amico’s shades and trot back down to the elevator with them, holding them out in front of me the way you might hold out something nasty you found on your apartment floor after a week away on vacation—a piece of decaying …

“Tonya Gregson.” It was as if she was in a trance. There was something in her eyes, though, something so terrible I could hardly stand to look at it. Nevertheless, I stored the name away. Tonya Gregson, Rahway.

… I’d had about Sonja with a fellow named Warren Anderson. She must have looked like she thought she was going to pop back up and ask somebody for a Coca-Cola, I had thought when he told me what he’d seen. Over drinks in the Blarney Stone Pub on Third Avenue, …