Nothing before this has been as thrilling. This raging tempest streaking through his system as he kisses a man — the second or third he’s kissed — who is older than his father, whom he’s seen in the grocery store and library of his tiny town his whole life. They will make out, get naked, and move the whole project of stems and drugs and kissing into the bedroom. It will be a dizzy blur of smoke and skin, and it will be the only time he ever does this drug where doom does not eclipse bliss, where the two aren’t immediately at war. Doom will hit when he leaves a few hours later and realizes it’s near midnight and that he is in no shape to see Nell, his girlfriend — the person he has lived with for more than two years despite his growing attraction to men.
Before he leaves Fitz’s apartment he goes into the bathroom and carefully washes his hands, which have grown sooty and burnt from the hot stem. He washes his face and fixes his hair so it doesn’t look like he’s been thrashing around for hours. He checks his clothes, brushes off his blazer, makes sure all his shirt buttons are buttoned, his collar is straight, his fly zipped. Behind the locked door, in the tiny bathroom off the entryway, he runs through all of this — swiftly, mechanically — at least a dozen times. It’s as if he’s on autopilot, or responding to some primal, animal instinct to transform from one state to another. He pulls up his socks, rubs the spots off his shoe, and wipes his brow once more. As he checks his hair and gargles with the mouthwash he finds in the medicine cabinet, Fitz knocks a few times to make sure everything is okay. Be right out, he calls as he takes one last look in the mirror.
He hunts for a cab on Lexington and hopes Nell has gone to sleep. He is startled how time has changed shape, how six hours has felt like a few minutes. He worries he’s left something behind. He’s not sure what exactly — he has his wallet, his keys, his tie bunched in his blazer pocket — but he’s sure something is now missing.
This will be just before or just after the night he meets Noah. Certainly it is before he tells Nell he has to leave her, before he’s introducing Noah to his mother, who tells him he must not tell Kim, or anyone else in the family who might tell her, because the news might cause her to lose the twins she’s recently become pregnant with. Before he introduces Noah to his boss, his friends, and the writers he works with. It is before Noah is known to his world, but which came first — the night he met Noah, the night with Fitz — will never be clear. It was a time when everything seemed like a beginning.
Family Reunion
Noah is the first thing I see when I step out of the elevator at the Maritime Hotel. Half crouched, on one knee, bearded and shaky, he appears both on the verge of sprinting and holding up his hands to protect himself from attack. And there’s something else — as if he’s been caught at something, as if somehow he is the guilty party. I haven’t seen him since the night at the Carlyle three days ago.
I sprint past him toward the lobby’s door. He calls and I don’t pause.
From somewhere else I hear: Billy!
Billy?
No one calls me Billy — no one but my family, friends from college, and people I grew up with — and I hear the name now as if it’s shouted across a dinner table from childhood.
Billy!
It’s my little sister, Lisa. I don’t see her but know it’s her voice. She’s twenty-five but already has a voice — smoke-choked and sad-shattered — that should have taken another twenty years to earn. It’s the kind of voice that to some sounds like a good time.
I scan the lobby as I move toward the main door, and there they are. My father. Kim. Lisa. My family. My family minus my mother and little brother, Sean. I can’t believe they’re here. My father would have had to come down from the hills of New Hampshire where he lives alone; my sister, Kim, from her husband and twin boys in Maine; Lisa from Boston.
I slow for a moment to make sure that the little man in the bright blue Windbreaker and gray New Balance running shoes, standing in the chic, dimly lit lobby of the Maritime Hotel, is actually my father. He has never once, in the twelve years I’ve lived in New York, stood on the island of Manhattan. He has never once seen where I’ve lived or the offices where I’ve worked. And, until now, he’s never met Noah. I wonder if I am hallucinating.
Willie, c’mon, the man stammers in a tight Boston accent.
It’s him. Looking like J. D. Salinger hauled out of rural seclusion and dropped into a big-city setting that could not appear less comfortable.
I can’t get out of there fast enough. As I reach the door, Lisa grabs at my jacket. I can smell her perfume and cigarette smoke as I shake her off and run toward Ninth Avenue. She follows fast behind, screaming at me to come back. A cab jerks up to the curb. I get in and yell, Go! which, thank God, it does. The sun blazes off the chrome and glass of oncoming traffic and I have to squint to see Lisa run into the street, hail a cab that barely stops as she yanks the door open and jumps in.
As I shout to the driver not to let the cab behind us follow, I cringe in shame at how cartoonishly awful the situation has become. Like so many other moments, this one feels lifted from an after-school special or Bright Lights, Big City. The cabdriver plays his part — rolls his eyes, drives on. Through the rear window, I can see my family and Noah scatter onto the street. It is midday in the city and the world rushes on around them. I am struck by how small they are, this is. How swiftly these unseen little urban dramas are done and gone. Doors click shut, motors roar, taxis squeal away, people disperse. Through the window, I watch them recede to dots. Light flashes from everything and I can barely see.
In the Clear
After three years in remission, my mother’s breast cancer has returned. The literary agency Kate and I have started has been open for a few months and we finally have phone lines. I am determined to have a 212 area code and, against the advice of several friends, pick ATT as our carrier because it is the only one that won’t saddle us with a 646 or, worse, 347 prefix. This matters to me. Many delays and snafus follow, and I come to find out that Verizon controls the equipment in Manhattan, and ATT is their client, so the glitch in our line has to be dealt with through Verizon but mediated by an ATT troubleshooter in Florida. These phone calls take hours each day. At several points during the first weeks of doing business on cell phones, it is made clear that we can easily have phone service if we just give up and go with Verizon. I refuse, again and again, and hold out for the 212 area code. I even instruct the printer to go ahead and print all the stationery before it’s clear we’ll be able to use those beautiful 212 numbers ATT assigned us months ago.
During this time I sell more books than I had expected to; with Kate’s help, staff the agency with assistants and a foreign-rights director; show up for lunches with publishers and authors; and talk to my sister and mother several times a day. My mother is going to a breast cancer clinic in Boston, driving three hours each way from Connecticut to see a doctor who has laid out a course of treatment. After a few weeks it is decided that she will have a double-radical mastectomy and, on the same day, reconstructive surgery. It means she will be in the operating room for eight or nine hours, but she won’t have to go back under if all goes well.