The Executor by Jesse Kellerman Page B

time inside. We visited Walden Pond to see the leaves turn; we followed the Freedom Trail and sucked down clam chowder. On Saturday mornings we would take long walks through the leafy neighborhoods surrounding Radcliffe Quad, stopping in at open houses to pick up tear sheets, pretending to be a young couple in search of their first home. Yasmina liked to stand in these living rooms, remodeling them in her mind—but respectfully, with an eye toward preserving the details that gave them character. Afterward we would get coffee and donuts and sit by the river, watching the scullers: pale young men moving in unison, bright boats against steely water. The Head of the Charles Regatta was by far our favorite weekend of the year. Standing there, cheering on the Crimson, we allowed ourselves the fantasy that our presence in the crowd signified more than high test scores and the need for demographic completeness; we shed our motley, inglorious pasts and became, briefly, full-fledged members of the American intellectual elite, part of a long line stretching back to John Harvard himself.
    Plus, our sexual chemistry was fantastic. That explains a lot.
    If not for her, I would have ended up homeless much sooner than I did. I was lucky enough to meet her right before losing my standing, and while the cynical might regard my decision to move in with her as one of expedience, at the time it felt like love.
    In fairness, I never took her or her support for granted. The opposite: I felt indebted and strove to justify myself by assuming all the housework. I shopped for groceries. I picked up her dry cleaning. I went to the library, checked out Joy of Cooking , and read it cover to cover (knowledge whose application entailed considerable trial and error, and once triggered the hallway sprinklers). Yasmina loved to throw parties but was more or less hopeless in the kitchen, coming to rely on me and my ever-expanding culinary repertoire, which soon included Thai and Mexican, her favorites, as well as a slew of Persian dishes: kebabs, crispy rice, unpronounceable stews.
    Playing houseboy allowed me to ignore my professional collapse. More than that, though: I liked doing chores. Their simple physicality was weirdly freeing. It turns out that there is no one more mundane, no one more housewifely, than a thwarted academic. Funny—and unsettling, as I realized how easily I could have gone another route. Had I never left home, who knows what would’ve become of me? Office flunky, fertilizer salesman, account manager for the slaughterhouse. I began to sympathize with my mother, to understand what it’s like to see one’s world reduced to soups and saucepans. Martyrdom has its comforts.
    And I didn’t object to living in relative luxury. The fact that I paid no rent yet came home to a king-sized bed and walls filled with tasteful nautical-themed prints did not, to my mind, mean that I had sold out. I wasn’t the one turning the hamster wheel. The bed, the art, the panini press—none of it belonged to me. All I had were my books, my clothes, my ideas, and half of Nietzsche. In this way, I justified becoming a yuppie.
    Yasmina’s disdain for her upbringing notwithstanding, at heart she’s very traditional. She would roll her eyes at her family, mock their accents and their provincialism, but I knew she still loved them. (Here we have a neat demonstration of the difference between an annoying childhood and an abusive one.) Holding their conventional wisdom in inexplicably high regard, she never could manage to get over the idea that she had to be married by twenty-three or risk dying alone. Most of the women she knew, including her sisters, were, foremost, homemakers. She’d had to fight for permission to go to college out of state. Certainly nobody expected her to go beyond a bachelor’s degree, and while her parents paid her law-school tuition, they refused to believe that she intended to work, viewing the pursuit of a career as a phase she’d