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By Root 363 0

obsessive object of horniness, and gay man of my dreams Paul Parlipiano is getting his Ph.D. in Sustainable Development at our alma mater’s School of International and Public Affairs. (I have only the vaguest idea of what that even means.) Tanu is at the University of Chicago Law School (“Where Fun Comes to Die!”), which I guess turned out to be an acceptable substitution for medical school in her parents’ estimation. Similarly, Kazuko’s parents both have multiple advanced degrees and will happily fund their only daughter’s efforts to match them diploma for diploma. She’s in the “rhetors” program at Berkeley, a totally esoteric discipline that will never lead to a real job, which I’m sure is just fine with her. ALF (because he—duh—looks like ALF) still has two glorious undergraduate years left at Columbia. As does my ex Kieran, who is still in sad, sad, so very, very sad emo love with the Barnard ’09 Regirlfriend he started sleeping with before he—oops!—stopped sleeping with me.

Just to prove that I’m not exaggerating, here is my complete list of friends/acquaintances my age who aren’t going back to school:

1–2. Scotty (Pineville ’02; nine credits short of Lehigh ’06) and Sara (Pineville ’02; ninety credits short of Harrington Country Club and Occasional University ’06)

Babymamadaddy are booked for the next eighteen years.

3. Dexy (two years at Columbia; six months at Bellevue; twenty-eight credits short of Columbia ’06)

She’s apparently in a state of permanent deferment since the bipolar breakdown she had the summer before our junior year. She works at Eros, an upscale sex shop in SoHo, and—surprise, surprise—she brought her work home with her. Or rather, her work bought her a home.

“I moved in with Daddy!” Dexy yelped the last time I saw her.

“You…what?”

Dexy pouted. “If you read my blog, you would know that. I thought you read my blog. You said you read my blog.”

I had stopped reading “Dex and the City” when I kept turning up as the priggish supporting character, the anonymous “girlfriend from Columbia,” scandalized by the leading lady’s reckless inhibition and bacchanalia. (It’s also when we stopped hanging out with any sort of regularity.) Dexy has always been hell-bent on grabbing Manhattan by the balls (both actual and metaphorical). I had always hoped that her blog was 99 percent Bushnell hyperbole, but never more than when she took up with “Daddy.”

“I’m a kept woman.” The throwback expression fit both her appearance and our surroundings. She had insisted on meeting me for drinks at Bemelmans Bar, a sumptuous Art Deco watering hole located at the stately Carlyle hotel. As usual, she was in costume, a houndstooth suit with broad shoulders and a cinched waist that drew attention to her hourglass curves. As she posed at the black granite bar—the wave in her platinum wig dipping low over one knowing eye, crimson Cupid-bow lips sipping a champagne cocktail—she looked just like a troubled dame straight out of 1940s film noir. I looked like the anachronism, the chainstore clearance-rack naïf, which was exactly as she had orchestrated it.

“Please,” I begged, “please tell me you’re making this up.”

“I’m making this up.”

“You are?”

“No!” she cheered gleefully, face alight with the scandalousness of it all.

“I don’t want to hear about this,” I said, nursing a club soda because I couldn’t afford anything on the menu and wouldn’t allow her to use “Daddy’s” money to buy my booze. It was the principle of the thing.

“Yes you do,” she insisted.

“No I do not,” I said emphatically.

Of course, Dexy ignored my wishes and told me much more than I ever needed to know about her courtesan-keeper courtship, right down to the last gray hair on his desiccated testicles. I will spare you such specifics. (Only I just didn’t. Sorry.) All you need to know is that “Daddy” is (a) rich, (b) sixty years old, and (c) newly divorced with four kids all in Dexy’s age bracket, and (d) offered to let her move into his pied-à-terre with views of Gramercy Park after wooing her with the purchase of the two-thousand-dollar One-of-a-Kind