Over his ten months in New York, he’d settled into a dissolute routine of sorts. The piecemeal way in which he earned money meant that each day was markedly different from the next: On Sundays, he spent most of the day practicing with the band—they were calling themselves Anhedonia, though they worried that was too much of a cliché—in the space they rented in DUMBO, a cement-floored room in a warehouse that had been converted into studios. On Mondays, he attempted to lay out the principles of music theory for a small but terrifying bunch of students at Queens Community College. Though he only taught one two-hour class, the task generally consumed his entire day, as it took him a good ninety minutes to get out to the college, which was only accessible via a chain of obscure city buses. After class, he stayed and fooled around on the piano in his classroom, access to a half-decent instrument being the one perk of this awful job. (He’d hated practicing at Eastman, when it had mattered, but now he looked forward to it, if only because it was preferable to getting on the bus and making the slow journey back to Brooklyn.) Tuesdays and Wednesdays he stayed at home, recovering from his trip to Queens, and doing whatever copying work he had at the time. This was a tedious, detail-oriented business—often done by composition students desperate for extra cash—which entailed taking a large piece of music (a symphonic score or some such thing) and copying out, by hand, the parts for separate instruments (anywhere from four to sixty). One major score could take him months. In a bizarre, masochistic way, Dave enjoyed the coolie labor of copying, even though the scores he was copying were usually the worst derivative sort of crap. He loved the sight of the fresh black ink on the clean white page, and it was pleasurable to pattern out the beautiful, curving notes. He’d generally memorized parts of the pieces by the end, crappy though they were.
Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, he worked at a popular restaurant on Smith Street called Madame Woo’s, a cross between a traditional bistro—white tile floor, cloudy gilt-framed mirrors, Parisian street signs, black-and-white photos—and a Midwestern Chinese joint, with purposefully tacky red vinyl booths, a kitschy drinks menu, and a weird assortment of pan-Asian antiques. Thursdays and Fridays, he worked the main dining room, which was filled with older couples eating multicourse meals and moaning about real estate. Saturdays, he covered the front bar, in which girls of his own age perched on bamboo stools at the high tables by the front doors, watching the passers-by or perhaps desiring to be watched themselves, in their sundresses and capri pants and tank tops. In the room’s dark interior, similar girls clustered around small tables, talking animatedly to one another over watermelon margaritas and square plates of Vietnamese ravioli. These women inevitably flirted with him, often in an adorable, sweet, shy manner, as though they were simply bowled over by Dave’s particular charms and didn’t make a habit of throwing themselves at waiters. Among them, sometimes, was his upstairs neighbor, Katherine, flanked by two pretty friends, who always insisted on shouting something that managed to be both offensive and flattering, “I can’t believe you really work here! You just don’t seem like a waiter.” “Well, I am,” Dave would say. “Which makes me uniquely qualified to tell you about our specials. We have a nice roast duck in red curry sauce…” And the girls at the neighboring tables would lean in to hear what he was saying to these lucky friends of his, to see if he was somehow giving them preferential treatment.
Sometimes, he thought he saw Beth among this crowd of women and a little shiver went through him. But the tall girl sipping lemonade alone, making marks on a thick manuscript, was not Beth, nor was the fair-haired girl smiling calmly at a short, fat, freckled man. He would not admit that he was looking for her, that he was hoping to find her in his section, nor would he admit that he missed her—for he wasn’t even sure that he did—but he had no trouble confessing a less savory desire: he did not want her to marry Will Chase. Or anyone, for that matter. And yet, he did not want to marry her himself. And so he did nothing, nothing other than disparage Will to his friends—“Isn’t he kind of stiff?”—and take home the endless rounds of women who, like Katherine, made themselves strangely available to him when he approached their table, notepad in hand: a wholesome-looking yoga instructor who liked to go to foreign films at the Quad (not French films, as would be Dave’s choice, but tragic Chinese and Indian social realist flicks about child prostitution and such); a sunburned blonde who had played guitar for Their Own Devices, a Chapel Hill band that had been famous for a moment in the mid-1990s, though, the girl explained, they’d made no money, really, despite having toured the world with Neil Young and Sonic Youth; a boyish French girl who drank wine by herself at the bar, scribbling in a little notebook, and whom he’d shocked with his decent French. He was particularly fond of a lawyer, an earnest lefty like his dad, who’d been in his class at Oberlin, tiny and vivacious, with bright black eyes and shiny black hair. He hadn’t known her at school, but she recognized him the moment he approached her table.
As of late, these girls were feeling rather neglected, for Dave’s free nights were becoming increasingly rare. The Reynold Marks shows were coming up, and nearly every night, he found himself walking over to DUMBO, trying to ward off the pangs of anxiety that this whole endeavor instilled in him. “You’ve got to just get over yourself,” Sadie kept telling him, and he knew she was right, but he still felt stupid and awkward around the band’s other four members, mostly because of the enormous—or, okay, big—discrepancy in their ages. The drummer, a spoiled kid named Marco LaRoue, was only nineteen, nearly ten years Dave’s junior. He’d been kicked out of Bard his freshman year for drug trafficking. Which sounded hard-core, but in reality he’d just received a packet of pot through the mail (a campus mailroom clerk had detected the scent and called the cops). Like Dave, he’d gone to St. Ann’s, but he was one of the rich kids. His father was some sort of big art dealer and the kid now had his own place, a loft in a mixed-use DUMBO building, not far from the practice space. His father, he said, had bought it as an investment, thinking he might want to open a satellite gallery in DUMBO and since it was just sitting there empty, well, why not move in, right? (“Yeah, man. Totally,” Dave had responded.) He was obnoxiously handsome in the manner of an Italian movie star: full lips, olive skin, dark curly hair, the sort of large, hooded eyes that celebrity journalists inevitably describe as “soulful.”
When the band went to Pedro’s for a beer after practice, girls stared at him, openmouthed, or whispered to one another, perhaps wondering if he was a movie star. Some nights, he sulked and ignored them. Others, he played up this attention, sending over drinks to a table of pretty girls and bowing in their direction, like James Bond or a Korean gangster, which made Dave want to puke, even as he wished he could pull off such suavity without seeming like a complete asshole. He treated Dave in a similar manner: Sometimes, he jumped off the ratty plaid couch they’d installed in the practice room and gave Dave a manly hug, kissing him on both cheeks (his mother was from Milan, his father a Brooklyn Jew who had spun LaRoue from Lazarowitzky), and offering him a beer. Other times, for no discernible reason, he simply glared at Dave, responding with extreme sarcasm to any words that emerged from Dave’s mouth. Sadie suggested that he was intimidated, owing to Dave’s advanced age and musical pedigree. Quizmaster Quest, after all, was the stuff of Oberlin legend—their tapes on rotation at WOBC—particularly now that Jan Jensen’s postcollege band, Ladderback, was getting some serious play. But Dave suspected it was the exact opposite: the guy thought Dave some sort of fogy, with his Cure and Smiths references, and his classical repertoire. He remembered, quite clearly, what it was like to be nineteen: twenty-seven had seemed impossibly old, an age he’d never reach.