IN FEBRUARY, for my thirtieth birthday, Toby Glickstein threw a party in my honor.
That night it snowed heavily. Toby lived up near Columbia, in a rent-controlled apartment passed on to him by an uncle. I walked up West End Avenue, the snow sifting down between the residential buildings in fat adhesive flakes; the city windless, muted, yellowed and shadowed by streetlights. The sidewalks nearly empty: a different place. The street, otherwise obscured, revealed itself as two furrows of oiled black made by the tires of a recently passed car. Nothing else went by as I walked, and gradually the furrows took on a velvet whiteness, and soon disappeared.
“Jesus, Julian,” Toby said, opening the door. “You look like a fucking snowman. Well, happy birthday. Put the coat in the bathtub, please.”
In the living room eight men about my own age were huddled around bowls of tortilla chips and salsa. I knew this crowd. We were all Cochrane almuni of a certain ilk. Many of us had grown a bit taller since the old days, but neither contact lenses nor Clearasil nor hair gel could hide the fact that somewhere in the past we’d been geeks.
I shot Toby a raised eyebrow. He followed me back into the apartment.
“Well, you try rustling up some women on such short notice,” he said defensively. “Anyway, don’t knock it. These guys are the last line of defense between you and another night flying solo with Captain Kirk.”
“Nice try, Tobe, but I don’t have a TV.”
“You think that’s something to brag about?” Toby said. “That’s pathetic, pal. Now how about taking off the coat? You’re dripping on my carpet.”
We rallied. We drank—red wine, beer, and bourbon. We stuffed ourselves with Chinese food from the Moon Palace and traded ten-year-old wallflower gossip as if it was hot currency. There was Muller, Goodman, Krebs, Piombo, Wolff, Scheinbart, Pleven, and Yang. Krebs was trying to make his first film, Wolff was a freelance journalist, Pleven was in computers, Yang was a lawyer, and Goodman was an oil and gas analyst for Salomon Brothers. Improbably, Piombo had written a children’s book that was being published in the fall (he confessed to having intended it for adults). Scheinbart and Muller were between things and discussing the possibility of some kind of joint venture, possibly a yoga studio. This idea was greeted with derisive hooting by all.
After a couple of hours of this, after cake and tone-deaf singing, I snuck off to the bathroom, simply to be alone. I’d been having a decent evening. But beyond the daily routine of the classroom, I guessed, I’d fallen out of the habit of being around a social group for any length of time.
I closed the door and sat down on the edge of the tub. Beside me lay my heavy winter coat, where earlier I’d put it to dry. The wool was still damp. The snow that had covered it was strangely vivid to me, despite having disappeared. In my mind I saw it still falling, felt it settling once again on my head and shoulders. I put my face in my hands.
I was thirty years old. I needed to stop remembering, looking over my shoulder, being dragged from shore by a swirling tide of feeling for a woman who was gone and would not be coming back. Gone. A mother now, I had to presume. I didn’t know whether she’d had a girl or a boy, but I imagined a girl made in her image, and I saw this child walking, almost stumbling…. And Claire picks her up—
“Julian?”
Toby’s voice, through the door, followed by a tentative knock.
I jumped to my feet. “Just a minute.”
He knocked again. I flushed the toilet for the sake of appearances, turned the tap on and off.
“What is it?” I demanded, opening the door.
Toby’s eyes were bloodshot with drink. “You okay?”
“You weren’t puking, were you?”
“No.”
After a moment his face broke into a lopsided grin. “Good. Because we’ve got company.”
I followed him out of the bedroom and down the hallway. In the living room three women stood surrounded by eager, nervous men as at a high school dance. Two of the women were laughing. The third, standing slightly apart, was Marty Goodman’s sister, Laura.
She was pretty, if quietly so, with short dark-blond hair, gray eyes, and small, finely made features. Years before I had known her in that way—if you were a pimpled, late-blooming boy imprisoned in the dungeon of adolescence—you inevitably knew the elder sisters of your friends: across a hopeless chasm of immaturity. A year older than us and several inches taller, Laura Goodman had belonged to another, better race. Once while visiting Marty in his parents’ palatial Central Park West apartment (a bunch of us, including Toby, had gathered to play a marathon game of Risk), I’d had a glimpse of his sister in her room, sitting on her bed with her back against the wall, reading Jane Eyre. Looking up from her book, she caught me spying on her through the half-open door. And there followed—or so I’d imagined—a shared ephiphany of eros, during which she saw through the humble chrysalis of my present physique to the gallant winged man within. I’d felt readier than ever to fly.
But then she shut her door, and that had been that.
All this I wanted to recount to her now that we were adults. But she hadn’t been at the party more than a few minutes before she put on her coat, clearly intending to leave. On an impulse I asked her where she lived; when she said the Upper West Side, I offered to accompany her. To my surprise, she accepted.
I walked with her back down West End. The snow had stopped, the sky was a frozen pond tipped above us. Our breaths fogged in the night. But the sidewalks were no longer pristine: boot prints and dog piss and soot. A snowplow came grinding up the avenue, thrusting mounds of gray slush against the sides of the frozen, parked cars. Then the tar of the street was visible again, wet and glistening.
I told her about the last time I’d seen her, fifteen years ago. By the time I reached the part about her closing the door in my face, she was laughing.
“You were all such pests!” she said.
“Thank you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You bet I do.”
“You were more interesting than the others, though,” she added thoughtfully. “I remember you.”
Subtly encouraged, I told her what else I remembered. The Chorus Line poster on the wall above her bed. The shelf of books about horses and the light blue bedspread with dark stripes and the old stuffed horse with the missing eye. How when she read a magazine as opposed to a book, she’d sit hunched over with her legs crossed and the magazine in her lap, turning the pages noisily from the bottom. All of it meaningless except that it should be recalled now, years later, by two different people.
“Yes,” she agreed, looking me in the eye. “Different.”
Outside her building, within view of the uniformed doorman, she let me kiss her. Our breaths blew smoke. The surface of her lips was like polished stone. But past that I tasted in her an abundant warmth.
I had been celibate for too long. Untouched, a tribe of one, muttering my own language, ritualizing myself to no avail. Not caring or wanting or having. The months simply passing.
Now, through the bulky layers of our clothes, in a public street, I felt the first resonant intimations of Laura’s slender body, and pressed myself against her like an animal.
She pressed back.