That night I riffled through my father’s cabinet and found the file containing last year’s applicants. I found his picture. Open shirt collar, Billowy, long hair, the dash of a movie star unwillingly snapped by a paparazzo. No wonder I’d stared at it. I wished I could remember what I’d felt on that afternoon exactly a year ago—that burst of desire followed by its instant antidote, fear. The real Oliver, and each successive Oliver wearing a different-colored bathing suit every day, or the Oliver who lay naked in bed, or who leaned on the window ledge of our hotel in Rome, stood in the way of
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