Excerpt from I Will Be Complete by Glen David Gold, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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One person reacted to his name, once. At a party sometime in the 1980s, I met a novelist whom I knew by reputation—a happy bullshit artist in the way of those Beats who made careers and academic posts by riding out the ambiguity of whether they'd actually had Kerouac sleep on their couch.

I was twenty-two and the novelist was in his sixties. He was talking to a beautiful woman who held her drink with both hands and who regarded him with suspicion, like he was about to offer her candy. As I was walking by, he brought me into the conversation, which I recognized as a gambit to make her reduce her grip on her glass to one hand, to let the other settle to her hip.

"Excuse me," he said to me. "You look part English."

"That's true."

"Is the other part—Jewish? I ask that as a full Jew myself."

"It is."

"I've often thought the combination of English and Ashkenazi makes the most handsome man in the room. Don't you think so?" he asked the girl, who was noncommittal. "This fine woman," he said a moment later, "still hasn't decided to leave her husband for me, but I can't blame her."

"The question is whether she's going to expand her horizons or let them stay as they are," I said.

He started to say something he'd prepared but faltered. The conversation continued the way he was driving it as before, but his interest in her—obligatory as it already was—was complicated by this: I wasn't a chump. I'd been moderately funny but I hadn't tried to compete. I was staying in the conversation to make him look good. That's a set of skills that develops in unusual circumstances. After the woman left for better prospects, he wanted to know about me.

"How did you come to San Francisco?" he asked.

"My mother met a man at the Mark Hopkins Hotel."

When that was all I said, he laughed. "What is it about the Mark Hopkins?"

"She met a man who said he wanted to buy her a balloon and take her to Paris."

I have to stop short my writer's memory, the desire to underline. I can't claim that he froze his wrist just as the drink was about to meet his lips. "I think I knew that man," he said.

"You knew Peter Charming?"

When he spoke again, it was with caution. "Do you know where he is, still? Are you friends with his people?"

"No, not anymore."

It was unnerving to see a man like the novelist, whose identity pivoted on tall tales, sweep my eyes with conviction to see if I was telling the truth. How would he know if I was sincere? He asked my mother's name, I told him, he squinted—vaguely, he thought he remembered her, but he wasn't sure.

"Is your mother all right?"

"No."

"I'm sorry."

I'm never sure what to say when people have to say that about her.

Finally, he said, "Charming was doing terrible things."

"I know."

"You knew?" He looked alarmed. It was as if I were aware of atrocities but had done nothing.

No, maybe not, I realized.

"It was the seventies," he said, "and some of us fell victim to improving ourselves in ways that turned out silly. It was a silly decade. People took advantage of that. Charming was bad. I heard bad things."

"Like what?"

"White slavery."

I'd seen some things but no, I hadn't seen that. I wanted the conversation to last longer, but another woman walked by, as pretty as the last, and in mid-sentence the novelist waved her down, introducing us. He told her I was his son.

As I shook hands with her, he made up a biography for me, the spawn of his second marriage, I was out from Cleveland, I was on the crew team at my college, didn't I look just like him? As he spun the story I went along with it. He said my mother, his ex-wife, was English, and he felt that the combination of English and Ashkenazi Jew was the most handsome on earth. Hadn't he done right by me? Wasn't I a wonder?

Excerpted from I Will Be Complete by Glen David Gold. Copyright © 2018 by Glen David Gold. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.