Joe visited me from New York a few years ago, refusing to believe it was over between us not just because my year-long visit there was over. I appreciated his insistence upon the slightest possibility and invited him to my apartment. I had the slightest idea that would kick off a series of shocks for him before I checked him in the school hotel. He could not or would not pee in my toilet, which is basically a hole. After all, my 20-year-old apartment seemed to him worse than the settlement apartment in the Bronx.

Still, we visited each other back and forth until last summer. Over a period of 4 years, I was never invited to see his toilet or apartment with the excuse that he lives with his "crazy" sister and her "sick" husband.