In a scene straight out of a movie, I race across Fifty-Third Street toward Fifth Avenue from the copy place near my house to get my completed manuscript to Jackie before Doubleday closes for Thanksgiving. It wasn’t my plan to cut things this tight, but the copy place had a toner issue (whatever that means) and it took twice as long for me to print. And then the register tape jammed, so I finally just threw cash down on the counter and told them to keep the change. A casual observer would diagnose me suicidal the way I’m racing through city streets at dusk; when I can’t plow into traffic without facing certain death, I jog in place like a runner who doesn’t want his heart rate to slow while waiting for the light to change. I make it most of the way in one piece before skidding on a jettisoned museum map outside of MoMA like it’s a discarded banana peel.
When I reach the building, my trailing scarf gets caught in the revolving door, and for a flickering second I imagine suffering the fate of that dancer from the 1920s (what was her name?) whose scarf caught in the open spokes of her car’s rear wheel. I can picture myself crumpled on the floor between revolving glass door partitions, manuscript pages raining down on me like prize money inside the cash booth on Beat the Clock. (Isadora Duncan! That was her name.) But the door plows forward and so do I and before I know it I’m in the lobby, making awkward eye contact with the security guard who would have been tasked with retrieving my strangulated body. I sign in, the same as I’ve done maybe a half-dozen times over the past few months, and catch an elevator to the Doubleday floor just as someone is exiting.
The receptionist is packing up and I wave and say, “Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Big plans?” she asks.
“Going h-home.” The word gets caught in my throat. “You?”
“Same. Enjoy!” She waves me through and points the way, even though she knows I know where I’m going. Enjoy! I laugh to myself; if only a trip home were that carefree. I proceed down the hall with the cubicles and the framed covers, doing this weird trot that’s faster than a walk but slower than a run, bank a right at the conference room, and proceed directly to Jackie’s office. Her door is closed, but her assistant, Mark, is sitting at his desk in the hall.
“She in?”
“James.” He smiles at me and I’m confronted by his perfect teeth. “You just missed her.”
I slump to my knees dramatically and the manuscript lands on the edge of his desk with a thud.
“Oh, relax,” Mark says, unimpressed with my theatrics.
“I told her I would get this to her before the holiday,” I say, grabbing a piece of scrap paper and jotting down a phone number.
“She’ll be in tomorrow.”
“On Thanksgiving?” I’m appalled. And then saddened at the thought of her not having holiday plans.
“James. It’s Tuesday. Thanksgiving is the day after tomorrow.”
Not knowing what day it is can be one of the hazards of working from home. “I raced . . .” I breathe in deeply to get oxygen into my lungs.
“Yes, you did.”
“Eleven blocks.”
“I can tell.”
“For nothing.”
“You won’t have to come back tomorrow.” It’s more a statement of fact than an encouragement to look on the bright side.
But he has a point. At some hour tomorrow I would have certainly realized it was not Thanksgiving and done this all again on a day when the offices were all but certain to close even earlier. How many days in a row can one dash through the streets like a maniac and not get hit by a bus? “Well, anyway. Here’s a number where I can be reached over the holiday.” I slide him the scrap paper with my mother’s information.
“I’m just shutting down for the day. Any interest in grabbing a drink?”
“With you?” I say it out of surprise and not disgust, but Mark gives me the finger anyway. I laugh. His hair forms this one sandy curl that swoops down over his eyebrow. “Sure.” This could be a welcome distraction from the growing agita I feel at the mere thought of Thanksgiving dinner with my family.
I wait while he collects his things and wonder if this is appropriate. Surely he’s asking me to drinks as a young man working in publishing; knowing writers is a smart way to advance his career. Yet he’s only a few years out of college and he’s working as an assistant to Jacqueline Onassis, so he probably already has some connections—it can’t possibly be a job you get having your résumé blindly selected from the slush pile. So if he’s well connected, with a guaranteed career trajectory, is this something else?
“Where to, hotshot?” he asks.
I look at him, really look at him. He’s handsome, for sure—blue eyes, strong chin, rigid nose—but his best feature just may be his confidence.
“Forty Four?” I suggest the bar at the Royalton Hotel, but almost cringe as soon as it comes out of my mouth. I find dimly lit hotel bars erotic, and since I don’t know what Mark’s intentions are, it feels like playing with, if not outright fire, a modest flame. A smarter idea would be a well-lit bar without top-shelf booze, filled with tourists, that doesn’t have floors of bedrooms piled above it.
“Great.” I guess he likes hotel bars too.
We walk together, and the fall air is crisp and I can tell it’s one of the last few nights I will be able to get away without a winter coat. I ask where he went to school (Brown), and then a bit about Rhode Island and his family. His father ran for Congress as a Democrat in a heavily Republican district and put up respectable numbers (he lost by eight points less than the candidate in the previous cycle), making some Democratic higher-ups take notice. I wonder if this is how Mark got his job (Democratic higher-ups certainly have a line to Jackie), but asking outright seems rude, like I’m questioning his own credentials; I would never want anyone to think I achieved anything because of my father.
Forty Four, while not empty, is not buzzing with the usual after-work crowd. People, it seems, are already splitting town. We order our drinks at the bar and find a small table tucked in a quiet corner with plenty of shadow for cover. Mark gestures for me to sit down first, which makes me feel like I have more years on him than I actually do. My drink, a hickory old-fashioned, contains an ingredient called black dirt apple jack, which reminds me of Jackie’s father Black Jack Bouvier (a nickname I learned from A Woman Named Jackie, a biography I checked out of the library). Mark sips some concoction with gin and ginger beer.
“What’s it like?” I ask.
“Working with her?”
I notice he says with her instead of for her. If that’s his natural confidence or the arrogance of privilege and youth, I don’t know. “Yeah.”
“I don’t know. You work with her too.”
“That’s different.”
“Yeah. I’ve never been to the Vineyard,” Mark says, punctuating that very difference. I laugh nervously, but he pushes on, saving me from having to spill any secrets. “What’s it like? Her phones are busy. Everyone wants to talk to her. You have to know who to let through and, more important, who not to.”
“I can imagine.”
“I remember once I transferred President Nixon through to her desk thinking it was some other Dick.”
I laugh. Dick.
“No, I didn’t mean it like . . .” He slaps my knee and I bite down on the inside of my cheek so as not to react. “Someone else named Dick, one of her authors, and when she picked up the line she was stuck. I don’t think she hates anyone as much as she hates Richard Nixon. I got in so much trouble for that.” Mark pauses and sips his drink. “This is all just between us, right?”
“Of course,” I say, kicking his foot gently. I study the wide wale of his corduroy pants and the way his cuff bounces with my nudge. I’m not sure what prompts me to do this, the bourbon or the black dirt apple jack or his confidence with me. Or I’m lying to myself and it’s my own newfound confidence, from my new identity as author—even in quiet moments like this, my book’s publication likely still the better part of a year away. In either case, I want him to know he can trust me.
“Because officially, Mrs. Onassis doesn’t hate anyone. She’s too busy for that.”
“She’s above the fray.”
“Exactly.” Mark looks over his shoulder to make sure no one is within earshot. “I mean, she really is. She works very hard. She’s edited nearly one hundred books.”
I look over Mark’s shoulder as well. “You worried she’s here?”
“The Carlyle is more her style, but you never know.”
“Should we come up with a code name?” I ask.
“Sometimes, to friends, I call her Jo. Just, you know.”
“Joe?” Giving her a blue-collar man’s name seems almost too coded.
“Her initials. J-O. It’s less show-offy.”
“Ah.” Now it makes sense. “Ever share a drink?”
“With Jo? Once. Not bourbon though,” he says, indicating my glass. “She doesn’t like it.”
“Hmm. Do you like it?”
Mark reaches over and takes a sip of my drink without breaking eye contact. He shrugs. “It’s all right. Not my drink.” I look down at my glass where his lips just were and wonder if they touched the same spot as mine.
“Do you think Jo’s always wanted to work? That she would have pursued a career earlier if she could have? I think about that sometimes. The why of it all.” Our eyes are fixed on each other. “Is this weird? I have no one else to talk with about this stuff.”
Mark waves off my concern. “Oh, I know she would have. Worked. In fact, I think someone said she brought up the idea when she was married, but Onassis forbade it. Mediterranean men.” Mark shudders with a mild disgust that makes me laugh; he’s like a child repeating a grown-up phrase he heard without actually understanding the meaning.
“Date a lot of Mediterranean men at Brown, did you?”
“Ha ha,” he says, but then genuinely laughs too.
I should not encourage this, but it feels good to have a man treat me as someone who matters, for my work. Mostly, it’s nice to have Jackie in common with someone, to share her just enough to have a friend to gossip with about the absurdity of it all.
“You know, there are a lot of gay authors in her stable. A lot of gay men in her life,” Mark says.
I cock an eyebrow. “Stable.”
“Giddy-up.” He takes a long sip of his drink.
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know. We’re sensitive.”
“Ha,” I scoff. “Speak for yourself.”
“You don’t think you’re sensitive?”
“I don’t think of myself as particularly sensitive, no,” I reply.
“There’s a four-hundred-page manuscript on my desk that says otherwise.”
My face grows flush; I can actually feel the reddening of my cheeks. It’s embarrassing to be read so completely by someone so young. If he can see through me, Jackie certainly will. I think of her reading this draft and feel dread.
“There’s a book, in her library, in her Fifth Avenue apartment. Have you been? To 1040?”
“Not yet.”
“Just the Vineyard,” he says, shaking his head. “Well, I’ve only been to deliver stacks of manuscripts and occasionally mail, so I’m not showing off.” Now he’s concerned with grandstanding. “Anyhow, it was entitled The History of Homosexuality. Or something like that. It jumped out at me as out of place.”
“I got that book. At orientation. I never cracked it.”
Mark leans in, squeezes my calf and says “Ha,” then crunches on an ice cube until it’s gone. “I mean, who would read such a book? Most people either like homosexuals or they don’t. I’ve never heard of anyone researching the subject to decide if they should.”
I look down at my leg where he touched me. The modest flame is in need of containment. “Maybe she did, like gay people, and what she was researching was why.”
Mark shrugs. “Maybe.”
“You still find that weird.”
“I don’t know. I guess not that weird. She has a book on everything. I’m sure she likes books more than people.”
“Even gay ones,” I agree.
“Gay books?”
“Gay people.”
We laugh, although the idea of her preferring books to people is not an overstatement. We blather on about titles we’ve read and publishing in general, and as we near the end of our second round, Mark asks, “What are we doing here?”
“You suggested we grab a drink.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“That was bold.” He laughs, but I get the sense it’s not particularly bold for Mark. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
I lean back in my chair and swirl the last of the watered-down bourbon in my glass. I take a few seconds before answering. Since I told Jackie about Daniel it seems unwise to tell Mark something different. “I do.”
He shrugs. “Good. I wouldn’t want you to get attached.” He curls his lip like Billy Idol.
I do a quick calculation of the number of rooms in this hotel: Eighty, ninety, maybe? Plus another dozen or so suites and penthouses? I wonder how many are currently occupied and how many are host to people having sex right now. It’s early still. Seven-thirty. Probably only a few, if that. People engaging in a quickie before going out for the night. Are any hotel guests having sex with someone other than their professed partners? These are the thoughts that make hotel bars so erotic, this is the math that made coming here a bad idea.
“Should we get the check?” Mark asks. His directness is unnerving.
“I think that’s a good idea,” I say. But maybe for a different reason.
When the bill comes, I pay, even if Mark is sitting on mountains of family money, or even if Doubleday would have picked up the tab, and excuse myself for the men’s room.
The bathroom has just undergone the sort of New Age redesign that requires one to orient oneself upon entering. Normally bathrooms are intuitively laid out. Not in New York. Not anymore. I was in an empty men’s room recently with a wall of running water and a circular trough in the center of the room. That’s it. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to urinate on the wall and wash my hands in the trough or relieve myself in the trough and run my hands along the trickling waterwall. Eventually a man exited a hidden stall and proceeded to wash his hands in the trough, so I took initiative and peed on the wall.
Since what I’m really here to do is splash some cold water on my face to bring me to my senses, I’m glad when the sinks present themselves as sinks and not basins of plumbing mystery. The cold water is rousing, so I repeat the action two or three more times. What am I doing? Nothing. I look up at myself in the mirror and am almost surprised to see my reflection, water slaloming down my face like tears. I realize now, working on this latest redraft, how much I’ve felt like a ghost. Alone. Writing is an inherently solitary endeavor, immersing yourself in another world, either make-believe or in the past—in my case, a confusing combination of both.
I love Daniel. I’m not unhappy. I finished my book. I’m not a ghost. Not really.
So why does it feel so charged to be seen?
I reach for paper towels and dab my face dry, and when I look up I see Mark’s reflection in the mirror walking toward me from the urinals, zipping up his corduroys. I flinch.
“Jumpy,” he says.
“I thought I was alone.”
“Well, you’re not.”
To prove his point, he steps closer so we’re only inches apart. I don’t want to feel any heat, I don’t want to feel anything, but I do. I start to sweat in my blazer. Flustered, I ask, “Did you wash your hands?”
“Is that really what you want to ask me?”
I can feel blood . . . moving . . . where it shouldn’t. “I don’t know what I want to ask you.” I wish desperately I could do my jumping-jacks thing, since it always helps me to think, but that would require a monumental feat of explanation. The visual is funny, and I emit a small, nervous chuckle.
“I thought one of the advantages of older men is that they knew what they wanted.”
“I’m thirty-one.”
“Yeah?”
“That makes me older men?” This is breaking news to me.
Mark leans in and hugs me tightly and eventually I hug him back. He’s thinner than Daniel—scrawny, almost—and it feels strange to hold him. The side of his face presses against mine and it feels electric, sexual. It’s smoother than Daniel’s scruffy one, softer, younger; he reminds me of a boy I loved in college. I look at the restroom door, almost willing it to open, begging for our privacy to be interrupted, but quickly realize I’m on my own to stop this.
After a good thirty seconds I wriggle him off me. “Okay.”
“Oh, relax,” he says, letting go. I’m souring on this as a catch phrase. He turns on the faucet to wash his hands.
I pivot away from the mirror and adjust myself in my pants, uptucking like a seventh-grader desperate for his classroom erection not to be seen. “We don’t have to make a big deal out of this.”
Mark looks at me with pity. “Is it a big deal?”
“No, no, I guess not.” I lean against the sink, wishing I could click my heels three times and be home safely with Daniel.
Mark leans across me to reach for the paper towels and his arm brushes against my chest; I expect a shock of static but it doesn’t come.
“You’re not going to tell Jo, are you?”
“God, no.” I spit the words out so quickly I almost choke. I look around to see if anyone else has walked in, to see if any of the stalls are occupied.
Mark gives me a puzzled look, She’s definitely not in here.
I want him to disappear. I don’t want to have to say good-bye, I don’t want to have to ask him about his holiday plans, I don’t want to chitchat about the manuscript, about business, about his family in Rhode Island. I just want this to be done.
“Should I walk you to the subway?” I offer, praying he’ll say no.
“Nah, I’ll cab it.”
Cab? I should have let him pick up the bill. “Okay.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, James.” He leans in to hug me again, but I take the opportunity to shake his now-clean hand instead. He rolls his eyes.
“Happy Thanksgiving, yourself.”
I turn back to look in the mirror, as if it will tell me what the fuck just happened, and in a moment he is gone.