That night will go by in a flash. I make it home sometime before eight, but after Noah has left for the day. There is no note on the bar. I have a vague memory of a foreign publisher — German? Dutch? I don’t remember — who is scheduled to come into the office. I shower and dress and walk up Fifth Avenue to the office, and my head pounds from all the vodka the night before, and the sky is the most extraordinary cloudless blue I have ever seen. North of 14th Street, I see a young editor I know run across Fifth Avenue in a bright white shirt. I wonder why he’s running so fast.
When I walk into the agency, everyone is there. A friend calls just then and says that the Twin Towers have been attacked. Almost immediately the office, the people from the other offices on our floor, people calling, are hysterical, and there is an image on CNN.com of one of the towers billowing with smoke. Rumors escalate and the atmosphere is chaotic and frightened. Noah calls. He is crying. He asks if I am okay, does not mention the night before, and says that he is watching the towers from his office window in SoHo. We arrange to meet at the apartment later.
I suddenly remember that the appointment I have is to get my hair cut by Seth. I call to see if he is open. He says to come over. My hair is shaggy, and with my bloodshot eyes and pasty skin, I think it’s more obvious than usual that I’ve been out all night. Getting my hair shampooed and cut can’t hurt, I think, as I grab my wallet and head out the door. My assistant asks me where I am going, and when I tell her, To get my hair cut, she stares at me, speechless.
As I walk west across 25th Street, a jet flies low enough that the buildings all around me rumble and I crouch on the sidewalk and cover my head with my arms. It will be the only moment of that day that won’t feel numb. The rest will be surreal and far away, as if I am watching them on a screen or through a thick lens.
Both towers are still standing when I reach Sixth Avenue. I linger there for a second or two before heading across 22nd Street to Seth’s. Everywhere people are quiet. Everywhere people move gently, slowly. They are careful with one another.
Seth’s place is empty and we listen to the radio as he washes my hair and slowly cuts it. I wonder if he can tell how polluted I am, how strung out from the night before. Unlike when we engage in our usual chatter of gossip, we barely talk and are silent as the report of the first tower falling comes over the radio. Seth’s phone rings but he lets it go on and on until the machine picks up. It takes over an hour for him to cut my hair, and I think it is because he doesn’t want to be alone. I am grateful to be here, in this seat, safe.
I leave Seth’s and walk back to Sixth Avenue, where a throng of people on the corner are all looking south. Something feels off balance and I have a brief flash of vertigo as I follow their gazes downtown to the now bland tumble of buildings there. The towers have fallen. An hour ago they stood there, on fire, billowing with smoke, and now they are gone. They were just here, someone says as I try to locate where exactly in the skyline they used to rise from. But in the cloud of soot and smoke that hangs above the blur of buildings that could be any city now, I can’t remember where they once were, what it all looked like. I have already forgotten.
Where
When Noah is away: Home.
When Noah is home: Mark’s or Julio’s or any satellite thereof. Hotels.
If between home and elsewhere: Back of cabs; bathroom in the lobby of One Fifth; stairwell landing between fifth and sixth floors of One Fifth; video booth at porn store on 14th between Sixth and Seventh and the one at 44th and Eighth, near Orso; bathroom at L’acajou; bathroom at LensCrafters on Fifth Avenue; bathroom at McDonald’s on Seventh below 14th Street; desk at my office; bathroom at my office; stairwell of office building; in Central Park behind trees and in bathroom stall by Delacorte Theatre; Westside Highway under shrubs; in basements of buildings under construction, behind Dumpsters, in Dumpsters, anywhere.
In London: Charlotte Street Hotel, back of hired cars (not black cabs), behind hedges at the top of Highbury Fields.
In Paris: On bench in the Place des Vosges, on bed in brothel; in back of a cab driven by guy who gives you a free bag of hash; in stairwell of apartment building; café bathrooms.
B
EAR IN
M
IND
In transit, let stem cool before shoving it in pocket or it will burn through your pants.
The Jesus Year
This is the year of the most nights out. The most notes left on the bar, the most shattered mornings, the most broken promises to drink only two vodkas at dinner, the most abandoned resolutions to stop calling Rico and Happy and Mark and Julio and anyone else who can lead me to getting high, the most calls to my assistant to say I am sick, the most lies.
It’s more than three years after my mother’s surgery, a year after she stops chemo, and the year Noah makes his movie in Memphis. The agency is doing well. We’re turning a profit, and a number of books that I am selling are not only the subject of heated bidding wars among book publishers but go on to be excerpted in places like The New Yorker and reviewed well everywhere, and in one case on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. And there will be one, a cherished one, that appears like a winking miracle of enchanted audacity which becomes a finalist for the National Book Award.
Before the nomination, before the publication, there will be a lunch given at La Grenouille, a French restaurant in the East 50s. I ask an acquaintance, an almost-friend, Jean, to come. Jean who never goes to lunch. Jean whom I met in the lobby of the Frankfurter Hof hotel when I was twenty-five and who, for years after, invited me to book parties and other gatherings at her terraced penthouse overlooking the East River. Jean’s parties always have a funny mix of staggering accomplishment, fame, wealth, political passion, and genuine strangeness. Sometimes there are small dinners and sometimes seats at benefit tables. But as years pass, there is always a seat at the table. And every time feels like the last. The one where I will say the thing that will correct whatever mistaken illusion she has of me and reveal the fraudulent imbecile that I am.
So I invite Jean to the lunch at La Grenouille. I invite her because the book she wrote about the gritty-fabulous rise and fall of a Wasp princess is a favorite of the author of the Winking Miracle. I invite her because of her literary glamour, because she matters to the author, and because she is also a friend of the author’s Legendary Editor. For all these reasons, and because she has invited me to so much, and because when she is around I feel, strange and unlikely as it seems, loved, I ask her to come. Impossibly, she agrees, and I am excited for the rare energy she will bring to the event, the likes of which are organized purely to generate energy to launch whatever new literary rocket into orbit. Months go into getting this lunch together. There is a generous friend of the author’s who has agreed to sponsor it, and because of the elegance of the restaurant and the influence of the author’s Legendary Editor, and the hustling on everyone’s part, there is an unusually august group of literary lights scheduled to attend.