I tramped into the living-room and got my jacket from the back of the chair. I took the pack of Camels out of the side pocket, lit one up and filled my lungs with rich, fragrant smoke. As I was exhaling, I surveyed the room and reflected that being untidy was less a lifestyle choice of mine than a character defect, so I wasn’t about to argue with this – but I also felt quite strongly that this wasn’t what counted, because if I wanted tidy, I could pay for tidy. What I’d keyed into the computer, on the other hand – at least what I remembered keying in, and hoped now I was remembering accurately – was definitely something you couldn’t pay for.
I went over to it and flicked on the switch at the back. As it booted up and hummed into life, I looked at the neat pile of books I had left on the desk beside the keyboard. I picked up Raymond Loewy: A Life and wondered how much of it I would actually be able to recall if I were put on the spot. I tried for a moment to conjure something up from memory, a couple of facts or dates, an anecdote maybe, an amusing piece of designer lore, but I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t think of anything.
OK, but what did I expect? I was tired. It was as if I’d gone to bed at midnight, and now I was up at three in the morning trying to do the Harper’s Double Acrostic. What I needed here was coffee – two or three cups of java to reboot my brain – and then I’d be fine again.
I opened the file labelled ‘Intro’. It was the rough draft I’d done for part of the introduction to Turning On, and I stood there in front of the computer, scrolling down through it. I remembered each paragraph as I read it, but couldn’t have anticipated, at any point, what was going to come next. I had written this, but it didn’t feel like I had written it.
Having said that, however – and it would be disingenuous of me not to admit it – what I was reading was clearly superior to anything I might have written under normal circumstances. Nor, in fact, was it a rough draft, because as far as I could see, this thing had all the virtues of a good, polished piece of prose. It was cogent, measured, and well thought out – precisely that part of the process that I usually found difficult, even sometimes downright impossible. Whenever I spent time trying to devise a structure for Turning On, ideas would flit around freely inside my brain, OK, but if I ever tried to box any of them in, or hold them to account, they’d lose focus and break up and I’d be left with nothing except a frustrated feeling of knowing each time that I was going to have to start all over again.
Last night, on the other hand – apparently – I had nailed the whole goddamned thing in one go.
I stubbed out my cigarette and stared in wonder at the screen for a moment.
Then I turned and went into the kitchen to put on some coffee.
As I was filling the percolator and preparing the filter, and then peeling an orange, it struck me that I felt like a different person. I was self-conscious about every movement I made, as if I were a bad actor doing a scene in a stage drama, a scene set in a kitchen that was improbably tidy and where I had to make coffee and peel an orange.
This didn’t last for very long, though, because there was an incipient old-style mess in the trail of breakfast spoor I left behind me across the work-top spaces. Ten minutes saw the appearance of a milk carton, an unfinished bowl of soggy Corn Flakes, a couple of spoons, an empty cup, various stains, a used coffee filter, bits of orange peel and an ashtray containing the ash and butt-ends of two cigarettes.
I was back.
Concern about the state of the kitchen, however, was merely a ploy. What I didn’t want to think about was being back in front of the computer. Because I knew exactly what would happen once I was. I would attempt to move on to the rest of the introduction – as though this were the most natural thing in the world – and of course I’d freeze up. I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Then in desperation I’d go back to the stuff I’d done last night and start picking at it – pecking at it, like a vulture – and sooner or later that, too, would all come apart.
I sighed in frustration and lit up another cigarette.
I looked around the kitchen and considered tidying it again, returning it to its pristine state, but the idea stumbled at the first post – the soggy bowl of cereal – and I dismissed it as forced and unspontaneous. I didn’t care about the kitchen anyway, or the arrangement of the furniture, or the alphabetized CDs – all of that was sideshow stuff, collateral damage if you like. The real target, and where the hit had landed, was inside there in the living-room, right in the middle of my desk.
I extinguished the cigarette I’d lit only moments earlier – my fourth of the morning – and walked out of the kitchen. Without looking over at the computer, I crossed the living-room and went into the bedroom to get dressed. Then I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I came back into the living-room, took the jacket I’d left draped on a chair and searched through the pockets. I eventually found what I was looking for: Vernon’s card.
Vernon Gant – it said – consultant. It had his home and cellphone numbers on it, as well as his address – he lived on the Upper East Side now, go figure. It also had a tacky little logo in the top right corner. For a moment I considered phoning him, but I didn’t want to be fobbed off with excuses. I didn’t want to take the risk of being told he was busy or that I couldn’t meet him until the middle of next week – because what I wanted was to see him immediately, and face to face, so I could find out all there was to know about this, I suppose, smart drug of his. I wanted to find out where it came from, what was in it, and – most important of all – how I could get some more.
5
I WENT DOWN TO THE STREET, hailed a cab and told the driver Ninetieth and First. Then I sat back and gazed out of the window. It was a bright, crisp day and the traffic, as we cruised uptown, wasn’t too heavy.
Since I work at home and hang out with people who mostly live in the Village and the Lower East Side and SoHo, I don’t often have occasion to go uptown, and especially not uptown on the East Side. In fact, as the cross streets flitted past and we moved up into the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, I couldn’t actually remember the last time I’d been this far north. Manhattan, for all its size and density of population, is quite a parochial place. If you live there, you establish your territory, you pick out your routes, and that’s it. Certain neighbourhoods you just might never visit. Or it might be that you go through a phase with a neighbourhood – which could depend on work, relationships, food preferences even. I tried to think when it had been… maybe the time I went to that Italian place with the bocce court, Il Vagabondo, on Third and something – but that’d been at least two years ago.
Anyway, as far as I could see, none of it had changed that much.
The driver pulled up at the kerb just opposite Linden Tower at Ninetieth Street. I paid him and got out. This was Yorkville, old Germantown – old because there wasn’t much trace of it left, maybe a few businesses, a liquor store, a dry cleaner’s, a delicatessen or two, certainly quite a few residents, and old ones, but for the most part, or so I’d read, the neighbourhood had been Upper East-Sided over with new apartment buildings, singles bars, Irish ‘pubs’ and theme restaurants that opened and closed with alarming frequency.