Why do certain things shimmer on the horizon with fairy dust and others not? This lunch, on the calendar for months, sparkles in blue ink every time I open that page to pencil something else in on either side. I flush with excitement when anything associated with it crosses my mind or my desk — the book, Jean, La Grenouille, the Legendary Editor — all of it, folded together into a shiny promise of something blessed.
I need a suit, and in a burst of recklessness I go to Saks and pick out a slim black/navy lightly striped Gucci suit that costs over $3,000. The most money I’ve ever spent on any one piece of clothing. In it, in the dressing room, I look for a moment like someone I don’t recognize. Someone who has dozens of suits, dozens of pairs of shoes to go with them, and money to afford them all. Not recognizing yourself in the mirror is like seeing a photo that someone takes of you at a party and having your jealous eye drawn to the unfettered, attractive, someone-who-belongs-everywhere person gazing through the photograph over an impassable distance between their world and yours; you see that lucky bastard who you imagine has never had an uncomfortable, insecure, unadored moment in his life and you despise his ease instantly. And then you find out it’s you. It can’t be, you’re sure it’s not you. But when you see that he has your clothes on and, yes, Jesus, yes, he has the same large ear that sticks out and the other, smaller one that lies flat to his head; when you see that it’s you, you think for a second: Is it possible that someone might make the same mistaken assumptions about the you who is not you? It shakes you for a moment and you decide that in some essential way, the person staring back through the photograph is actually someone else. Or rather, he doesn’t exist. The angle of the photograph and the lie it achieves are like the suit. So if you’re standing in a dressing room, looking in the mirror, and see someone who looks like the person in that photograph, you buy the suit, because if that person can’t actually exist, it might as well look as if he does.
Two nights before the lunch, I’m at a dinner. I can’t remember which one or with whom but a few things can be counted on. I’m at l’acajou. I drink vodka. The waiters and waitresses top off my glass through the night. A gentle calm spreads into my chest with each glass and, gradually, the symphony of usual worries dies down. As those instruments still, and after the brief patch of ease begins to ebb, other sounds rise up from the pit. Agitated strings. Bullying horns. The pesky, restless want that feels like need. As I talk and listen and eat and laugh, I am waving my conducting wand, commanding the instruments to quiet. But as I wave more, I drink more, and as I drink, the sounds rise, become more insistent, and I excuse myself and go to the bathroom and call a number. This time it’s Mark’s and I arrange to go to his place after dinner. I worry a moment that the lunch for the author of the Winking Miracle is two days away and I need to be in top shape for that. But it’s two whole days, I reason. Even if I stay up most of the night, I’ll still have a full twenty-four hours to regain my footing.
I go to Mark’s and there is a blur of smoke and flesh and other people, and in the morning, this time, I don’t want it to end. The lunch is the next day, but still, somehow, it feels far away. A whole day and night and morning between now and then. It will work out. It always does. But this is the first night that wants to be two. Why this one and not the others? I look at the calendar from that time and it is graffitied with ink. Scribbled notes about lunch meetings, coffee dates, phone dates, drinks dates, trips to London, L.A., Frankfurt. Weddings, birthdays, benefits, plays, operas, book parties, screenings. So much to show up for, so much to camouflage for, to worry over. There is no busier period than that year when I am thirty-two and thirty-three. The sunstruck runup to the Jesus year. Someone — was it Marie? — always joked about thirty-three being the Jesus year — how it marked the end of one life and the beginning of another, the end of youth and the beginning of the undebatable status of adulthood. But I was twenty-four when she turned thirty-three, and adulthood seemed a world away.
Why was that the night that became three? Why did all the things that to anyone else, even to me, looked lucky, enviable, feel like burdens? It was the year I got tired, the year I began to give up. It was when the conducting wand broke and the sounds from the pit overwhelmed the conductor and drowned the hall.
I leave Mark’s by midday and check into a small hotel around the corner from the agency. It’s a cheap tourist hotel, one step up from a hostel, and I go there because Mark’s place is too sloppy, too smoke-charred, too exposed. The jittery paranoia I have seen in most of the crack smokers I have known has, during the last three or four times getting high, started to afflict me. This time it’s the most nagging, most persistent, and when I am at Mark’s, I find myself at the window, seeing what I think are unmarked police cars parked in front of his building. By morning I need to get out of there. I have Rico’s number, and I am pretty sure I can get him to deliver more in the afternoon. And so he does, and I stay up all night, alone and with reruns of the dingy and dated cable-access Robin Byrd Show, where rough-around-the-edges go-go boys and girls strip and let Robin perform oral sex on them. When this is over, I leave the station on all night. It runs low-tech ads for 1-900 numbers, with naked and half-naked men and women wooing the camera with talk of raunchy phone sex. The hotel room looks out onto an alley, and I lean out and look up at the panels of light reflected from other hotel rooms. Occasionally there will be a silhouette of a man or woman flickering across the brick, and I imagine a million scenarios. Sometimes a sound — a low crack, a muffled scraping, a window slamming shut — will echo through the alley, and a few times I call out, Hello.
Morning comes on fast, and by ten o’clock I realize I need to get home to fetch my suit for the lunch at La Grenouille. Noah has left dozens of messages, and beyond one phone call two nights before, saying I was alive and fine and not to worry, I have not called him. I still have a large bag from the night before and it gives me some comfort as I begin to face the day ahead. I reserve the hotel room again and take a cab to One Fifth to get my suit. Thankfully, Noah is not there, so I grab the suit, black shoes, and socks and haul out of the apartment, back into a cab and to the hotel room. It is noon by now and the lunch is at one. I can’t believe I’ve disappeared for two nights and a full day. Noah must be out of his mind with worry. But as much as I know this, I don’t call him, don’t track him down to let him know I am okay. I left a message on the voice mail for my assistant at eight a.m. to say that I would be going straight to the lunch, so that base is, for now, covered. But the lunch! Oh, Jesus, how can I go in this shape? I sit on the bed, pack the burnt, oily stem from the night before with a large rock, and inhale. My terror over the lunch, Noah, my office, and everything else vanishes like a flame suddenly cut off from oxygen. I roll up in the bedspread and let the flash of warm lightning race through my system. I lie on the bed for what seems like only a few minutes, but when I sit up again, it is five after one. The lunch. The glittering happy event that has sung its siren call for months has already begun, and I am strung out, unshowered, unshaven, and skinny from not eating. I take another hit and rush into the shower. It is almost two by the time I get out of the hotel and into a cab. After a shave and shower and the suit, I look in the mirror and, God help me, I convince myself that I look good. A little gaunt and shaky, but the suit, not to mention the bag and pipe and lighter I have in the breast pocket, gives me a shred of hope that I will be able to wing my way through the next few hours.