“How’d her husband die, anyway?” I ask.

“Car accident.”

“Sorry I asked,” I say.

“Believe me, so am I.”

The driver waits with uncharacteristic patience for a truck to pass us before veering into the speeding lane. But oops, it’s a double truck that swipes us, tearing off our sideview mirror. There are no seat belts in back, only a hanging strap, which I access. Larry doesn’t bother. At one point I ask Jade why the driver is going east when before he was going north?

“He not sure. He only know by sun,” she says.

We’re in the countryside now, passing sunflower fields. “This could be north Florida,” Larry notes from time to time, trying to find references to home to help him deal with his homesickness. “This could be North Carolina.”

I’m grateful that this is a highway and not a crooked back street, but we’re tacking and snaking as though it were a crooked back street. It’s like driving slalom on the autobahn, with the occasional trash can or patio chair strewn here and there, kind of brilliant in its own way, though I’m not sure I know what I mean by that. Suddenly there’s a pause in the action.

“Is it me, or did we just stop in the median and the driver got out?” Larry asks.

“He has to go peewee,” Jade informs us.

“Good to know I’m not demented,” Larry remarks. “Merely imperiled.”

The driver comes back minus his chicken claw and resumes driving. I work to keep Larry talking. I hint that he might want to talk about why he never got married. One great thing about Larry, even when he’s feeling poorly, you never have to coax; he comes out and gives you all he’s got. Complete mini-sagas-beginning, middle, and end all wrapped up with a bow.

“Ten-second story,” he says. “I’m fussy, simple as that. Never met the right girl. Well, strike that. There was one with…I don’t want to mention her name, but it didn’t work out with Chelsea-oops, guess I said it after all. That’s the misorientation speaking, whatever you want to call it. Who’d want me now anyway, in my state? What am I going to do, chase ’em with a cane? Those days are behind me.”

Okay, it’s a little shorter than I was hoping, but it does seem to warm him up a bit. I hint that he might want to tell the story about why he initially decided to find a mail-order bride, even though he doesn’t like referring to her as that.

“A lot of people in my coin-trading discussion group asked me the same question,” he says. “Here’s why. Because go to another temple mixer, meet another seventy-year-old overweight real-estate broker? No thanks. How I found Mary was on a Web site I already gave you the name of-it’s not coming to me at the moment-which they claim has forty-nine thousand women, which took me the better part of a week to check out. I checked out the men, too, just to see what I was up against. What a bunch of losers: potbellies, the works. There’s some guy with a big toofy grin saying he’s an astronaut from New Jersey. If he’s an astronaut, I’m a stud muffin. I myself was quite forthright: didn’t mention my illness but was otherwise quite honest.”

Seems like quite an omission, but…must be a boy thing. “But then Mary turned out to be lacking in some of the essentials,” I skip ahead, to keep his rally going, such as it is. He’s looking so poorly that I’m grasping at straws.

“Sadly, yes,” he says. “Though I do want to correct the record on one point, if I may. Mary’s son is not mentally endangered. I misunderstood. He’s actually a very capable young man. He just graduated university, where he was captain of his basketball team, and just got his first engineering job. Mary is very proud of him. I don’t know how I got that wrong, and I apologize for it. Oh, I miss Mary ever so much.”

Gets me every time: this tough guy using Edith Wharton language. But he’s backsliding now, so to cheer him up or give him perspective, whichever comes first, I segue to the subject of…our relationship. “Larry, not counting our recent estrangement, why do you suppose we’ve basically always gotten along?”

“No big mystery, Dan. We’re straight with each other. Not overly straight, not straitjacket straight, but straight enough so it works. Plus, look at this, you’re giving me a fake Cartier from the marketplace. Thank you, Dan. You can never have too much of a good thing. And just to show you how much I appreciate it, I’m going to put the Cartier on my left wrist to go with the Rolex on my right. The Chinese will think it’s a new status thing.”

From here it’s a natural step for him to talk about our childhoods. How we did this together. How we did that together. His memories are much more vivid than mine: None of it sounds even vaguely familiar to me. Two or three hours go by, and the deeper into the countryside we drive, the less familiar his memories sound. The pump of Larry is primed, and he’s talking a blue streak; I couldn’t shut him up if I tried. How at my house he was always nervous around the dinner table because everyone used big words all the time. How our housemaid frightened him-he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to act around her. How one time my mother took him to the train station to go home and she saw he was craving an issue of Popular Science on the rack and she bought it for him, even though he begged her not to because it cost so much-seventy-five cents.

The sagas are flying. But then the world he’s talking about becomes distinctly alien. How his father, Sam, the lovable but illiterate garage mechanic, used to beat him with a belt. How a respected great-uncle manhandled him sexually. What? This isn’t even the same orbit of planets on which I was raised. I can’t accept that. Great-Uncle Auguste, the hero who fought in the French Resistance, abused him as a little boy? Larry isn’t really saying that, is he? Not in so many words, maybe, but he gives me to understand that we view the world from very different starting points. There in the backseat of this tiny rattrap cab, with no seat belts and an empty can of kidney beans for an ashtray, Larry tells tales that make me think I’ve never known my cousin at all, never known the universe we supposedly shared.

As if to mirror my dismay, the air outside’s gotten worse. Dense, chewy ribbons of smog have spread themselves over the sunflower fields like shrouds of mutant spiderweb filament. They’ve moved the smokestacks out of Beijing into outlying regions as part of the plan to sanitize the city’s image for the Olympics, and we’re now in the thick of it. Raw, unscrubbed black smoke tumbles into an already filthy sky, making the air so bad that cars put on their headlights in the afternoon light and you can hear the particulates hissing around like drizzle. Nor does it help that car exhaust is leaking into the cab through the floorboards. We’re awash in bad air, inside and out.

But a little reality check. I must have misheard him before. Auguste, who had that beautiful library of rare French books in leather jackets-a child molester? Could that possibly be true? Could the fact be that all the children in the family were protected from Auguste, but no one protected Larry? That he was expendable, his ass didn’t count for much?

“This could be Georgia now,” he says. “Look at that red soil.”

I tune out for a while, won’t allow myself to take in any more. I watch two grandmothers hobble along the median strip, holding hands. I watch a mattress lashed to a highway sign nodding in the wind. The pollution’s bothering my eyes, making me blink twice as much as usual. Eventually a question is directed to me.

“Dan, do you remember my bar mitzvah?”

“I only remember you saying in your bar mitzvah speech that you wanted to grow up to become a munitions dealer,” I say.

“That was more for shock value than anything else, though it did seem like a pretty sweet life,” Larry says. “But do you remember what happened afterward? After the ceremony when everyone moved into the banquet hall to have lunch, you stayed behind and started making speeches into the podium microphone that you assumed was dead. You didn’t know it was being broadcast live into the banquet hall-”