What before had been a tyrannical struggle between two hostile factions, with his affection as the prize, degenerated into sporadic skirmishes between them over the years, and Neal felt neither loyalty nor disloyalty towards his parents: he tolerated them, and lived his life within the eye of a hurricane, so that they could not touch him. He had unconsciously slipped into the solipsist position, and at the age of twelve had developed the defenses of the practiced pessimist. What he wanted most was to be rid of Rhoda and Jay, as well as of Eva, whom he despised with an intensity that enraged him when he so much as thought of her. He accepted his mother’s frequent and casual affairs with strange men who from time to time showed up at the apartment, then vanished as though they had fallen off the earth. He forgot about them and so did Rhoda. He was dark and thin like Jay, with Rhoda’s green eyes, and the brooding manner of a man who has had a disastrous love affair, so that nothing could ever again be the same.
