Bomb Shelter was meant to teach us nuance and compromise — a welcome departure from the usual “bosses bad, workers good, kibbutz best of all” indoctrination of camp. Counselors would dress up as characters vying for salvation, and we campers would make our selections for the hypothetical bunker (in the summer of 1976, the premise still seemed entirely plausible). Each candidate was a flawed archetype: the Construction Worker was strong and young and able to sire offspring, but he was also a meathead; the Old Philosopher might have been the ideal choice for spiritual leader of the New World Order, but his advanced years meant that he was frail and probably shooting blanks; the Young Woman, her obvious fertility notwithstanding (she was sporting an advanced pregnancy of a sofa cushion under her peasant blouse), lacked education or abilities. You get the picture.

Their presentations made, the contenders then walked around the room to address each team directly. It was like the Iowa caucuses if the Iowa caucuses had been attended solely by Jewish children from Canada. When we asked Chaya, the drama counselor, who was portraying the Aging Schoolteacher — smart but old, barren, and weak — how she proposed to teach in a postnuclear world bereft of school supplies, she answered with a vehement, “I can fashion pencils from twigs!” This struck us all as somewhat desperate. One should want to escape the fiery apocalypse, certainly, but one shouldn’t be seen as actively campaigning for it. That was just vulgar.

Young Woman approached, and I, elected team spokesman, voiced our concern that she seemed too tiny for safe childbirth in the hospital-free moonscape of the future. It was an odd thing for us to have focused on, since we were all similarly small-boned. Moreover, it seems unsporting that we would suddenly hold Young Woman to the physical standards of genuine adulthood, given the pretend nature of the exercise. It was like asking the Old Philosopher how he planned to stay geriatric once he ran out of baby powder for his hair. And how did a bunch of kids even know about pelvic width or childbearing hips, anyway?

Young Woman’s face suddenly got sad. She put her hands on my shoulders and leaned her face into mine. I thought she was going to kiss me, but her lips bypassed my cheek until I felt her mouth, hot against my ear. “Don’t tell anyone,” she whispered, “but I had an abortion last winter.”

An abortion! Can you even imagine the lubricious thrill of being the recipient of such a disclosure? I am here to tell you that you cannot, because its pleasures were unquantifiable. If she had an abortion, then that meant … she wasn’t a virgin! I couldn’t choose from this bouquet of penny dreadfuls; it was almost too much. And still, at the same time, what I really wanted to do was to put my own hands on Young Woman’s shoulders, look her in the face, snap her back to the reality of this artifice, back to this game. “Hey,” I would say to her, “I am only eleven!”

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That Young Woman should tell me her secret was momentous, to be sure, but only in degree, not kind. This was far and away the juiciest thing I’d ever been told up to that point; an absolute jewel of adolescent Go Ask Alice reality (it was also just about the last time that I would characterize someone else’s secret as “juicy.” The word would eventually be stricken from my lexicon, about which more later), but already by that age I was the person to whom people poured out their hearts. I cannot remember a time when they didn’t.

There is dubious profit in conjecturing about how one appears in others’ eyes. In a recent interview, Joan Didion had to face the rather deflating fact that, after a brilliant writing career that has spanned decades, one of the most enduring truths about her seemed to be that she was terribly thin. The chilling insight about myself is that, despite a bout of cancer in my twenties and having subsequently published two books — events that might occasion a phone call — there has been a monolithic silence from the cohort of my youth. I can only conclude that I was every bit as awful and unpleasant a child as I fear myself to have been in my darker moments of self-recrimination.

And yet as faggy, loud, skittish, neurotic, caustic, and polymorphously, fun-ruiningly phobic as I was (and boy, was I ever), the most striking thing about me — well, until my sophomore year of college, anyway — was that I was very, very small. I always looked years younger than my actual age. Something about my tiny frame coupled with an advanced vocabulary put people at ease where confidences were concerned. I was the very opposite of a threat. If others had reservations about trusting me, they seemed to dissipate as quickly as that fleeting moment when one hesitates before undressing in front of the dog. I was there, but not there. In gypsy folklore, when one has a secret that can no longer be borne in silence, one digs a hole in the ground and speaks those terrible truths into it. I was that hole. But a hole with a difference. A hole who could arrange his features and posture into an expression simultaneously neutral and un-morbidly curious. A hole who knew enough, once confided in, not to be a malicious blabbermouth.

I don’t know when I learned to do this, but I do know exactly where. Psychiatry is my family’s profession. A certain kind of active listening and an understanding of the importance of confidentiality is just part of the fabric in most shrink households. Just as children from Chinese immigrant homes might speak Chinese or the shoemaker’s children are likely conversant with the various components that comprise footwear (not to be confused with the old Yiddish parable about the shoemaker’s children who go barefoot, which proves the very opposite of what I am trying to say here and could be the subject of an entirely different essay, which I might take a stab at when everybody I know is dead), in some unspoken way I had hung out my shingle from an early age and made it known that I was open for business. And I’ve been relatively lucky in the secrets that have been sent my way. Not because they are so juicy (again that awful word; I’ll get to it, I swear), but because they are so relatively tame, in the larger scheme of things. I have never been told any tales of financial malfeasance (probably because it’s not worth dealing with what would surely be my idiotic interjections of, “Is ‘net’ the bigger number, or is that ‘gross’?”). No one has tearfully confessed to me an indiscretion involving, say, a blinding fugue state of racial hatred, a machete, and the innocent Tutsi children next door. There are perpetrators and victims aplenty in my closely guarded blotter, but no actual crimes committed, at least not in New York State. Most of what I hear about is infidelity. A lot of infidelity. So much infidelity it’s a wonder anyone manages to stay together.

But together we stay, whether we like it or not, enmeshed in a frequently terrifying Venn diagram. Even divorce cannot sunder New York’s incestuous network of friends, lovers, and colleagues. As my friend Rebecca says, “We’re all connected by paychecks and body fluids.” My childhood dream — that I would move to New York and have a creative life filled with many interesting friends who had terrible, terrible problems — came true. I have lived here for a quarter of a century and worked in and around the book trade for close to twenty years. New York is, at this point, almost shtetl-like in its overlap. Once, I sat at the dinner party of a friend and her parents while it slowly dawned on me that the patriarch was none other than the man who had been habitually sleeping with (and slowly breaking the heart of) another man I knew. Another time, I mentioned to someone that some friends of mine had a similar piece of artwork in their apartment, only to realize that this copy had been a gift — a token of philandery — from one of those friends. On one of my birthdays, with no plans of my own, I hung up from a phone call with a friend who had just decided to divorce her husband and answered my buzzer, only to find the weeping, straying, soon-to-be-ex coming up my stairs to give me the same news. I sat for a long time with still another weeping husband on his living-room sofa; I had hopped on the train to the Upper West Side from Brooklyn one Sunday morning because it had sounded on the phone like he might kill himself. I made myself scarce when we heard his wife’s keys in the lock. Four hours later, their fight concluded, they found me asleep on their bed. That was fun.

I’ve only ever been in trouble once, and then for a relatively minor infraction. I once neglected to give a friend some warning about another’s impending nervous breakdown; he was leaving his job as a result of his collapse, which affected the first friend professionally. It would have cost me nothing to quietly tell her, I suppose, but I was adamant about discretion. In truth, though, I was angry. When she called me to give me the news I already knew — the news I had chosen not to share — her voice was almost musical, swooping with the italics of schadenfreude. “Want to hear something juicy?” she asked.

The answer to this question is almost always no. Here I actually will use an old Yiddish parable: an old woman is called out of her house to join her neighbors in the fun of watching the Village Idiot ranting in the square. She goes, and there he is: a grown man, raving like a lunatic, spewing saliva and curses to the amusement of all, except the old woman, who doesn’t crack a smile. Her friends wonder why. “If he wasn’t my idiot, I suppose I’d laugh, too,” she tells them. Juicy effects a toxic bit of transubstantiation. It turns secrets into gossip. Your pain into someone else’s pleasure. Every town fool is someone’s damaged, schizophrenic son.

But that’s really the only time it backfired. So far, I haven’t had my teeth knocked out. Perhaps because I don’t wheedle. I employ no tricks — no special child-of-psychiatrist lingo or proto-hypnotic gestures — not in the getting of information, nor in the guarding of same. And I do guard it.

“You’re like this big ear,” said a friend.

A big ear with a peppercorn for a heart. Like many impulses of an apparently altruistic cast, it is also powered by a generator of unattractive self-interest churning away in my grimy sub-basement. At age eleven, I understood that the deviant desires and inappropriate object choices roiling away in my young psyche might best remain unbroadcast until such time as I could, say, grow up and move to Manhattan. And there is no better way to conceal oneself than by listening to others.

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Present-day Toronto is a megalopolis of sprawl, but thirty years ago it simply ended at Steeles Avenue, like a medieval map. On one side were apartment buildings, the last outposts of civilization, and right across the street, an unknowable expanse of open corn fields stretching out to farming communities and farther away still, the vast, piney wilderness. Bears, moose, eventual tundra, right across the road.

The winter after Bomb Shelter, Young Woman and I were pressed into service one Sunday to lead an afternoon program for children who lived north of the city. Yuval, the shaliach — the kibbutznik envoy who had been sent with his family to live among us — drove us beyond Steeles out to an old one-room church building of dull, pink brick standing in a treeless yard. We waited for forty-five minutes, chatting among ourselves, while not one child came. I can’t imagine what we managed to talk about. Yuval was a man of forty with children, Young Woman was in university in the sciences, and I was all of twelve. But I do remember feeling like Yuval was cramping my style. Young Woman and I hadn’t seen each other for over six months; we had some catching up to do. I was her most trusted confidant, after all, and she would no doubt be itching to bring me up to speed on all that had transpired in her life.

After nearly an hour, during which nobody arrived, we decided to cut bait and head back to the city. Yuval would turn out the lights and lock up while Young Woman and I went outside to wait. We stood in the churchyard under a dull, oyster-colored sky. The early March air smelled of cold mud. I turned to Young Woman and gave her a look at once casually companionable and one also meant to convey the World, heavy with the import of what she had once shared with me. A look that said, “Alone at last. I never told anyone, you know. That thing we share. Remember?”

But she didn’t seem to. Her eyes lingered over my face in the most fleeting and casual manner before she went back to cracking the wafer of ice on a puddle with the toe of her boot. Hearing Yuval turning the deadbolt on the church door, she brushed past me, muttering, “Well, this was a fucking waste of time,” as she headed for the car.

There would be many more instances like this, where the people who had told me things had no memory of telling me, or at least claimed not to. Perhaps one day I will have heard too much. I will be a living reminder of someone else’s shame and be dropped as a result. It hasn’t happened yet. For the most part, we all go on. The canker of a terrible secret eventually stops throbbing. That’s the hope, at least. There’s really no predicting how someone will weather having spilled their beans, just that they will spill them; that is inevitable. We are wired for unburdening as a species. I don’t flatter myself. It could be me or anybody who bears witness. But when it is me, I listen, mindful of the gift, remembering all the while that the shore would be wrong to believe that the waves lap up against him because he is so beautiful. &