“Well, shall we bolt?” Drew finally says.
“Sure,” Millimom says, gathering the plates.
Everybody’s quiet on the way back to West Adams, the radio filling in the silence. Driving by the lot, he takes in his long afternoon look at the wall. When Drew pulls up to Triumph House, there are guys on the front porch playing cards.
“I gotta get back in and start dinner prep,” Mateo says. That’s a lie. He had dinner prep last night. He could conceivably spend another hour with Drew and Millimom, but he doesn’t think he has it in him. “Thanks for coming to see me and thanks for taking me out,” he says. He leans forward in the car to kiss Drew on the cheek.
“Bye-bye, honeybunch,” Drew says. “I’ll call you this week.”
He leans right and kisses Millimom’s cheek. “Thank you again for coming out to see me.” Say hi to Dad for me is what he should say right now, he knows, but he doesn’t.
“Bye-bye,” Milly says to him flatly.
He hops out of the car. He squares his shoulders and walks up the path to the house, waving hello to his house buddies as he does. He resolutely does not look back at the Prius. He listens and waits until he hears it recede down the street. Bobby G. is sitting on the porch steps reading a battered old James Patterson paperback, probably from the house “library.”
“Mr. Mateo,” he says, “how was your day with the ladies?”
Mateo sits down next to him and puts his head in his hands. “Sometimes I fucking hate myself,” he says.
Bobby G. puts a hand on his shoulder. “Welcome to my world, little man!” He laughs. “The Try-Not-to-Hate-Yourself-Too-Much-Today Club! We’re all VIP members here!”
Seventeen. Revelations (2017)
Asa Heath, Jared Traum’s buddy dating all the way back to St. Bernard’s School in the early 1980s, hauled his forty-seven years of girth down East Seventh Street. He was sweating in his haste, late to meet Jared at some new bar, and preoccupied, his head still pounding with a day’s worth of data from the office. He’d briefly set aside his tablet while in the subway to rest his eyes but was still seeing algorithms in front of him. Yet he was not too much in his own head to suddenly stop and gape in front of the humble, rickety-awninged redbrick entrance to the Blue and Gold Tavern.
“The Blue and Gold is still here!” he blurted out, aloud, to himself. A lifelong Upper East Sider, he was always elated to discover, when he visited other neighborhoods, anything that still existed from his school days, back when they all had high hopes, say, that Mayor David Dinkins would hold on to a second term. And so this: the Blue and Gold! This was the very bar where he, Jared, Milly, and their other friends — that pretty, crazy Drew, who’d gotten her act together out in L.A. and become a big writer — had drunk away so many nights, shoveling quarters into the jukebox to hear more Guns N’ Roses.
“Twenty-five years!” exclaimed Asa — again, aloud. He often talked aloud when walking alone. That, he thought, was something you could still do in New York without attracting so much as a raised eyebrow. And yet pretty much every other memory seemed like an unreliable old dream of an analog New York, when you promised friends you would leave them Friday-night messages on their work voice mails that they might call into from a payphone to find out where to meet you.
Meanwhile, the stores, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops began looking more and more like it was ninety years ago. Of course, in these shops would be the gleaming transparent plastic devices that did the business and the math, but as the future took hold, nobody wanted it to look like the future anymore.
So it was that evening that Asa found himself walking into one of those very throwback, let’s-pretend-it’s-Prohibition bars a block past the good old Blue and Gold, which would’ve suited him just fine. A perfectly scratched, repurposed old mirror ran the length of the bar, surrounded by fake vintage white-and-black subway tiling. At the end of the bar, nursing a pint, sat Jared, his still-full head of honey-colored curls dusted through with white, his hands very calloused and his waist trim, thanks to the vegan diet that virtually everyone seemed to eat now, plus three mornings a week in a concrete-walled gym, tossing heavy balls at a $200-an-hour trainer. Jared, everyone told him, looked far better at forty-seven than he’d looked at forty.
The two men exchanged a rough hug. Asa called for his pint.
“How you been?” he asked.
Jared smiled slyly. “Pretty good.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“In fact,” Jared said, running his thumb cleanly around the rim of his glass, “she may come by in a bit and join us.”
“Sweet!”
Jared smiled and fondly shoulder-bumped his friend. Asa was that friend, the one some people have, if they’re lucky, who hears out decades of highs and lows and only passes judgment if he thinks major self-sabotage is looming. Asa had never played that card with Jared. Certainly not when Milly and Jared adopted Mateo, even though Asa had still been single at the time and, truth be told, viewed the kid at first as a menace to their drinking schedule. But then Asa grew pretty crazy about Mateo. Two years later, when the woman he’d been dating asked him if he wanted kids, he thought about a particular afternoon in Tompkins Square Park kicking around a soccer ball with Jared and Mateo, then about a certain pizza they’d shared at Two Boots afterward — an afternoon that had felt to him like a perfect embodiment of bare-bones male happiness — and he said to his girlfriend, “Very much so.” Together, they then had two daughters.
Still, Asa wasn’t too dim to understand that, for Jared, agreeing to adopt Mateo, just when he had started wanting his own kid, was his concession to Milly, to his love for her. And once they adopted him — well, whoa. They had no idea how hard that would be. Not that there wasn’t a window of about seven years, when Mateo was between ten and fifteen, when the three of them seemed to find their groove. They had some good times in those years together, Jared and Asa with their new families, in Montauk each summer, once or twice in Europe. But then, around fifteen, Mateo, suddenly so full of himself and conscious of his coolness, “turned,” as Milly and Jared would say. A few years later, his drug thing started. And it was around that point Asa started meeting up more and more with just Jared, for a beer or an art crawl.
Those were the years their marriage disintegrated, Jared told Asa. With Mateo’s drug thing at first, when he started failing out of Pratt, there was a feeling that of course he’s doing this, he’s acting out all those childhood feelings of loss and rage and grief, they’re just catching up to him now. Milly and Jared were on the same page at that point, for a moment.
But Jared’s resentment was already starting to show. “I wonder if the zombie will come home tonight,” Jared said one night to Asa.
“Say what?”
“When Mateo first came to live with us, I used to think of him — I mean, I never said this to Milly — as a kind of zombie, because he was so. . flat. So shut down. Zombie kid from the land of the dead. Then, you know, once he hit nine, ten, he started coming to life. Sweet kid, showing enthusiasm, learning to show affection, really into his art. That’s why, when the dope started, I remember thinking: The zombie’s back. He wasn’t there behind the eyes anymore.”
Asa was the first person Jared had told about the sculpture incident, minus Mateo calling him a “fraud mediocre rich piece of shit.” If Mateo had meant to gut-punch a fortysomething artist who’d not yet attained the status he’d blithely considered his birthright in his early twenties, he’d succeeded, and Jared had too much pride to repeat those damning words.