SO IT GOES.

I may have spent my insomnia skimming through all his parts in Kavalier & Clay

Bacon and Bubbie seemed, in the dining room, to have run out of things to say to each other. It was one of those prolonged silences that meant, Ethel always used to say, that somewhere an idiot had just been born.

“I’d like to meet someone, you know,” Sammy said at last. ”I mean, I’ve been thinking. Just recently. Meet someone nice.”
His mother shut off the tap and pulled the stopper from the drain. Her hands were bright red from the scalding water.
“I’d like that too,” she said. She opened another drawer and took out the box of waxed paper. She tore off a piece, spread it on the zinc counter, and took a dish from the rack.
“So how was he?” she asked him, setting the dish upside down on the sheet of waxed paper.
“Who’s that?”
She nodded toward the dining room. ”That one.” She folded the ends of the sheet of paper up over the dish and smoothed them down. ”At the rehearsal today.”
“He was all right,” Sammy said. ”He was good. Yeah, I think he’ll do fine.”
“Will he?” she said, and, lifting the wrapped dish, she looked him in the eye for the first time all evening.
Though it would recur often enough in his memory in later years, he would never know exactly what she had meant by that look.

Tracy Bacon, fictitious boyfriend of my dreams (if I actually manage to fall asleep).