a long while in front of the ebbing heat of my dinner, trying to digest what had just happened while listening to the familiar whooping hilarities proceeding from above.
Chapter 13
I LEFT FOR M ANHATTAN EARLY THE NEXT day. It was a Saturday, and I had no other pressing plans—save the one of getting some distance from my own family. About twice a year I drove down to New York, each time returning reliably refreshed from having hitched a ride on the sights and sounds of the speeding city. On impulse, I had called Mac the night before, while Lucy and the kids were still cavorting upstairs—she’d eventually returned to dinner, apologetic for having left the way she did—and had asked if he was available to pass a few hours. He’d said yes immediately, and then after a pause, asked if I’d heard the “big news.” He’d received what he called “a juicy contract” to write the “definitive” book on Rob. As a result, he’d managed to rent, for a month, Rob’s “horrendous” Chinatown apartment, which would help him “enter the mind of the madman.” His voice was high and thin with excitement as he told me his news. Would I like to see him at Rob’s place?
Standing in the house still in my absurd apron, feeling tender and sore, I hesitated a moment, wondering if I was up for it. Then I told him yes, I would, and I congratulated him a little rotely on his good fortune. I’d never trusted Mac completely, neither as a child nor as an adult. Up until high school he hadn’t been nearly as close to Rob as I had. Later in life, he would be bound to Rob by style and affect and by the fact of writing too, but back in the early years of our lives, when the deepest chords were struck, he was just another roly-poly kid with a bad haircut and grass-stained pants. I had the inside track. I knew the secret tender things about Rob that no one else did. And I always would. Why, then, was it Mac grabbing the glory?
It was still dawn when I left the house. After three hours heading south in the blank box of the interstate, I entered New York by the Saw Mill River Parkway, twisting my way through the woods above Manhattan, and then driving down the West Side Highway. That first view of the city always struck me as something grand, nearly patriotic, with the big silver ripple of river alive with moving boats, the low-slung frame of Jersey on the right, and the heavy, leaden mass of buildings rising on the left and filled with cells of gloomy promise.
What was my promise? I was a man in a teetering marriage and a dead-end job whose future seemed to stretch before him in a succession of endless repetitions. As I threaded the big car through a series of narrowing highways, I consoled myself for these gloomy thoughts with unflattering recollections of the way Mac’s professional personality had formed over the years, the lumps in itslowly smoothed out over repeated cycles of adaptation. At first, when he began writing for national magazines as a celebrity profiler, he made a point of being very haughty to us, his old school chums. He did this while still sucking up to the people useful to him, and this unstable balancing act between servility and pissiness seemed to prefigure the evolution of a truly awful person. He’d taken an apartment in downtown Manhattan somewhere, and on the rare occasions he came back to Monarch he made a point of either showily ignoring us, or, in a way I’ve since learned famous people do, being so over the top and effusive in his greeting that its obvious falsity is a different but equally offensive slap in your face.
By the time we were hitting our early thirties, success and having kids had softened him somewhat. Over the last year or so, his mom had been ailing, he was often in Monarch, and he’d opened himself up to us, his townies, by being the bearer of news about Rob. Since Rob’s death, he’d been even more candid and thoughtful—with me in particular—than ever before. Yet somehow
Chapter 13
I LEFT FOR M ANHATTAN EARLY THE NEXT day. It was a Saturday, and I had no other pressing plans—save the one of getting some distance from my own family. About twice a year I drove down to New York, each time returning reliably refreshed from having hitched a ride on the sights and sounds of the speeding city. On impulse, I had called Mac the night before, while Lucy and the kids were still cavorting upstairs—she’d eventually returned to dinner, apologetic for having left the way she did—and had asked if he was available to pass a few hours. He’d said yes immediately, and then after a pause, asked if I’d heard the “big news.” He’d received what he called “a juicy contract” to write the “definitive” book on Rob. As a result, he’d managed to rent, for a month, Rob’s “horrendous” Chinatown apartment, which would help him “enter the mind of the madman.” His voice was high and thin with excitement as he told me his news. Would I like to see him at Rob’s place?
Standing in the house still in my absurd apron, feeling tender and sore, I hesitated a moment, wondering if I was up for it. Then I told him yes, I would, and I congratulated him a little rotely on his good fortune. I’d never trusted Mac completely, neither as a child nor as an adult. Up until high school he hadn’t been nearly as close to Rob as I had. Later in life, he would be bound to Rob by style and affect and by the fact of writing too, but back in the early years of our lives, when the deepest chords were struck, he was just another roly-poly kid with a bad haircut and grass-stained pants. I had the inside track. I knew the secret tender things about Rob that no one else did. And I always would. Why, then, was it Mac grabbing the glory?
It was still dawn when I left the house. After three hours heading south in the blank box of the interstate, I entered New York by the Saw Mill River Parkway, twisting my way through the woods above Manhattan, and then driving down the West Side Highway. That first view of the city always struck me as something grand, nearly patriotic, with the big silver ripple of river alive with moving boats, the low-slung frame of Jersey on the right, and the heavy, leaden mass of buildings rising on the left and filled with cells of gloomy promise.
What was my promise? I was a man in a teetering marriage and a dead-end job whose future seemed to stretch before him in a succession of endless repetitions. As I threaded the big car through a series of narrowing highways, I consoled myself for these gloomy thoughts with unflattering recollections of the way Mac’s professional personality had formed over the years, the lumps in itslowly smoothed out over repeated cycles of adaptation. At first, when he began writing for national magazines as a celebrity profiler, he made a point of being very haughty to us, his old school chums. He did this while still sucking up to the people useful to him, and this unstable balancing act between servility and pissiness seemed to prefigure the evolution of a truly awful person. He’d taken an apartment in downtown Manhattan somewhere, and on the rare occasions he came back to Monarch he made a point of either showily ignoring us, or, in a way I’ve since learned famous people do, being so over the top and effusive in his greeting that its obvious falsity is a different but equally offensive slap in your face.
By the time we were hitting our early thirties, success and having kids had softened him somewhat. Over the last year or so, his mom had been ailing, he was often in Monarch, and he’d opened himself up to us, his townies, by being the bearer of news about Rob. Since Rob’s death, he’d been even more candid and thoughtful—with me in particular—than ever before. Yet somehow
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