Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

beyond the hot, faux living-room set seem unreal. No matter how many times he appeared on the talk show, and this was his seventh or eighth visit, he never lost the sense that everything on camera happened in an overcivilized dreamtime, not unlike the Australian aborigines’ mystical cycle.
    Nothing mystical about leaving the studio for Chicago’s hyperactive streets. Now he was in a cab on traffic-jammed Michigan Avenue near Water Tower Place.
    New York City soared, a stone forest primeval with thin tall buildings. Chicago squatted. The city’s broad, heavy-set edifices were also high and huge, but Chicago post-Carl Sandburg was more a sumo wrestler of a city. Manhattan was a wirewalker.
    Now Matt was trading one thick tower for another, from the TV studio to an office building a few blocks farther up Michigan Avenue.
    He carried a slim aluminum briefcase, accoutered more as a celebrity dilettante than a legal eagle. He’d bought it for this one occasion: broaching the law offices of Brandon, Oakes, and McCall. That decades-old name had been on the papers giving his mother title to the old, two-flat residence in the city’s decaying Polish section almost thirty-five years ago.
    By now, sitting on the hot seat of a television talk show set was old hat and Chicagoans he had contact with coming and going might recognize him. Might comment on the day’s topic. Tell him about their brother/sister/kid who should be on The Amanda Show. He had become what Temple so aptly called a semicelebrity. A regular on a surviving talk show. Not quite Oprah. Not Ellen. Not The View. But comfortably second tier. When it came to being in the spotlight, Matt liked second tier fine. That was where the fitful public limelight didn’t fry yôur private life for dinner.
    Dignity was not necessarily a requirement for the job but he’d managed to keep his, so far, during his media ramble. Dignity would be the key to getting any kind of honest attention from Brandon, Oakes, and McCall.
    And dignity was the reason he was visiting this old established law firm. His mother’s. She wanted to know more about the man who had sired him. A boy, really, from what little she’d told Matt about the circumstances of his conception. A young man determined to volunteer for a foreign war his family had the means to keep him safely out of. Meeting a girl from the wrong side of the WASP tracks in a church on the eve of shipping out.
    It was hard for Matt to imagine his timid, conservative mother being young enough to fall into first sex with a stranger she’d met in a church, before the flickering candles at a saint’s station.
    But she had. And what came of it? Only him, a fatherless child in a working-class Catholic neighborhood that didn’t forget sins of carnal knowledge.
    Matt found himself shaking his head in the back of the cab, which smelled of chewing gum and smoke. Its lurching progress through the rush-hour traffic was making him sick. Or something else was.
    His mother was fifty-four now, looking remarkably young yet leading a life circumscribed by her underachieving job and the Church. What good would it do her to know the name of her particular hit-and-run Joseph?
    He had died, that privileged boy who’d rejected his get-out-of-war free card. Over there somewhere. The family lawyers bought amnesia from mother and son with the title of a two-flat that would keep them, with a spare unit to bring in steady rent. Matt’s mother had never known more than his father’s first name but he’d been somebody, whoever he was. Any seed he’d sown on the way to annihilation was... so much wildflower along the highway. Unnamed, unnoticed. Unacknowledged.
    So much chaff in the wind. Then he thought of his stepfather, Cliff Effinger. Why had she married him when he’d been just a toddler? He’d asked that question at six and he still asked it of himself today, almost thirty years later. Effinger. Now dead, and Matt not sorry one bit. A mean, lesser man than the sainted boy Mira met at the saint’s station in the church.
    How could she? How could she have turned them both over to an abusive creature like Effinger? Unless she’d felt she deserved punishment? Unless she’d been so beaten down that she’d needed to marry a permanent punishment. Matt finally had grown old and big enough to banish punishment, but it hadn’t been soon enough. His mother wasn’t to blame; it was the social milieu that said that pain was a fallen woman’s only