Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (15 page)

“But!” John said. “There’s this incredible scene,
of course it’s like just typical Truman Capote, name-dropping left and right.
He’s like, so one time we’re talking about our mutual friend Montgomery Clift,
and he’s like, we went to the Gucci store together because Montgomery was
depressed, he was like, I’ll buy you lunch and I can get you a sweater. So then
we went to the Gucci store and he picked out twenty sweaters, and he went
outside and threw them in the street and started dancing around them. I kid you
not. And the people at Gucci were really good about it. They were like, ‘So who
are we charging those sweaters to?’ and Truman’s like, ‘Well, I can’t afford
this!’ And he’s like, ‘Montgomery, we need a credit card.’ And he’s like, ‘This!
Face! Is the credit card!’ ”

“Do you think that might work for me?” Edward
said.

“Maaaaybe,” Jason said.

“I have no credit cards though. I have my dad’s,”
Edward said.

“It would have been better if he’d charged it to
Liz. She’s good for it,” Jason said.

“That was bananas,” John said. “Bye, are you
leaving?” A guy had left the bar.

“A friend of ours is flying in from Paris,” the guy
said, “only for the night. May I please bum a light as well?”

They talked about a party the guy was planning, and
how chaotic the City could get.

“This is why I’m moving way out here,” the guy
said. “I live on Thompson Street.”

“Oh boy,” John said. That street could be loud.

“So if anyone knows a place opening up
. . .  ,” the guy said.

“You’ll be the first to know, I promise,” John said
with a little too much insincere heartiness.

Things were “booming real estate–wise before
September and now—” the guy said.

“And now it’s September,” John said. “You know what
the new theory is about Williamsburg?”

“The new theory?” the guy said.

“That it’s settling into middle age. Like people
are now moving there—like Trixie and Finn moving there?”

Trixie was John’s immediate boss these days, now
that Timothy was the overall boss. She was about six years older than him. She
and her husband, Finn, were, for now, childless but they did own a cat.

“It’s Park Sloping,” said someone.

“Exactly,” John said. “People are moving from Fort
Greene, the nice areas, to Williamsburg now.”

“I really like Boerum Hill,” the guy said.

“Well, they’re all leaving,” John said. “Boerum
Hill is the new Williamsburg.”

“I’m always ahead of the curve,” Jason said.

“I’ll regentrify Boerum Hill,” the guy said. “I’ll
open a little coffee shop. Well, thanks for the cigarette.”

“Alright, guy,” John said. “I’ll see you
Saturday.”

“Barbecue. Saturday,” the guy said.

He left.

“Oh my God, we just had to talk to Crazy Eyes!”
John said.

“He’s going to regentrify Brooklyn! Those eyes!”
Jason said.

“Oh, he’s Crazy Eyes,” John said. “It’s
unbelievable. He’s the one who was critical of my semi-western tennis grip. I
was like, ‘Oh, I’m experimenting with this semi-western tennis grip.’ And he
was
like, ‘You don’t use that already?’ He was like, ‘I’ve been using that for
years.’ ”

Then they talked about Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya
Harding for a while.

“Why do I feel this way?” John said. “I can’t
move.”

Later they ended up at Metropolitan, at the bar.
Eventually John decided that he was really tired. I have to go home, he said.
Jason went to go get his bag, and while he was gone, Edward asked, can I come
over? We don’t have to, like, do anything, but I’d really like to spend the
night with you.

ALL AROUND THE
City were signs for the upcoming election. The press was on, and the
Mayor was trying to solicit good feelings after making so many people so mad.
And everyone expected him to win by a huge margin, so while there was much
grumbling, no one minded too much, really, except a little, but also they
weren’t sure they had any better alternatives. He had a chief competitor who
seemed invisible, who seemed pale and unvivid in comparison to the Mayor. No
one
really felt like he was a character in the story of the City. The challenger
just couldn’t make himself felt.

The Mayor’s third run was a keenly played attack on
human nature. The Mayor knew full well that people, who almost always like what
they are accustomed to, tended heavily to vote for the candidate already in
office. The Mayor had found a way to do something that many people did not want
and then, as an encore, to suggest that the people were welcome to reject him
if
they wished—even while he was spending millions of dollars, just an immense
amount of money, in advertising. Advertising was supposed to eat away at any
resistance that people felt, and the more times someone saw an ad, supposedly,
the more people regarded the product advertised as something they couldn’t live
without.

SOME OF JOHN’S
family had been training for the annual end-of-summer get-together all
year. They stayed at a hotel called the Beachcomber. It was super trashy, but
also it was right across the highway from the ocean. This beach was as far east
as you could go away from the City. The pinnacle of the weekend—for some, at
least—was the tennis tournament. John had maybe played only three times all
summer. Before he hit the court, he had a few cigarettes and a big glass of gin.
He was literally swinging the racket as hard as he could, grunting like a
hog.

At the reunion, it was John and his two brothers,
his cousins—including his roommate—and his young nephews, Jesse and Julian. All
of them had been born in mid-October. Also there was his sister-in-law,
Shawn.

Jesse was six years old. John had brought him this
book that had been sent to his office. It was called
The
Pop-up Book of Sports
.

“Hey, Jesse,” John said.

“Hi,” Jesse said.

“Jesse, I have a present for you,” John said.

“Can I have it now?” Jesse asked.

“No, you have to wait for it later, but aren’t you
excited?” John said.

“How can you afford it?” Jesse said. “You don’t
have any money.”

“Where did you hear that?” John said.

“From Jake and Shawn,” Jesse said. He called his
parents by their first names.

John went over to Jake and Shawn.

“Oh, he’s just been saying that about everyone
these days!” Shawn said.

Shawn was a character. She was actually one of the
three hundred thousand or so people who worked for the City. One day she was
wearing a T-shirt that said “I [heart] the City” at work. And this was a time
when there was a new shirt, one that said “I [heart] the City more than ever,”
part of a campaign of improving civic pride. Why aren’t you wearing “that”
shirt? someone at work asked her. Don’t you know? Well, as a matter of fact,
Shawn said, I don’t heart the City more than ever now.

Then later they were playing football down on the
beach, and his brothers got rambunctious and then they got mad, and John called
one of them a dick, and they didn’t speak for the rest of the trip. Everyone
else got into the grudging spirit. Shawn made noise about how cheap John’s other
brother was. John took the train home and for a good while pretty much nobody
in
the family talked to each other. In any event John won the tennis tournament
for
the fifth straight year.

TYLER WROTE
JOHN
an email. Then he left a voicemail. And on it he was being all
cute, yawning, saying, oh, hey, good morning . . . it’s Tyler, call
me. John thought it was annoying, but Tyler surely thought the opposite. They
were going to get together on Monday. So that day John called at like four
p.m.

Are we on for later? John asked.

Oh, actually I can’t do it, Tyler said. Do you know
today’s my birthday? He was turning twenty-eight.

No, happy birthday! John said.

Yeah. It’s my birthday. So anyway friends are
taking me out for dinner. We could do something later this week.

Honestly, this week is really bad for me—

Well then, the week after, whatever!

Or I could do Friday potentially.

Oh okay, Friday.

So what’s going on?

Tyler sounded really grumpy.

You’re either really hungover or you’re really
grumpy or maybe it’s both.

What?

So then they talked and he started laughing a
little. But John was really laboring to make it an actual conversation.

Okay, John, I really have to go, Tyler said.

And John just hung up.

John told this to Chad. It’s bullshit, right? Yeah.
It’s bullshit, Chad said.

John told this to Fred too, overseas. Fred had
nothing to do over there, no friends yet, so he was more available than ever.
Plus he was “ahead” by five hours. One strategy for dealing with the shape of
the earth and the local time of day was stratifying most of the world into “time
zones,” so it was unified around the world that “morning” would mean sunup, even
though this made it just impossible to talk to people when they were in their
offices or awake even, sometimes. The time difference in this case was actually
helpful—Fred was always up. Fred, I need your advice on this, John said. What’s
the deal with this?

John, Tyler’s really moody, Fred said. I don’t
think it’s worth your time, to be honest. He’s really moody and he’s entitled
in
his moodiness.

Friday rolled around. They hadn’t talked since
Monday, so he texted Tyler: We still on for tonight?

With Chad, John had made a list of five expected
excuses, in order of likeliness: sick, it’s raining, have dinner with friends,
too tired and then: out of town. Then he revised the list: No response at all
was a late contender, as the third-most likely.

Twenty minutes later, John got a text: Hey John I
have a haircut to get at 9 p.m. tonight. And I have an early start tomorrow.
Let’s do something quiet, like, next week.

A haircut! Chad lost his mind. That is evil! That
is malicious! He was screaming at top volume: “That is fucking bullshit!” But
John thought it was pretty funny.

That night, John went out. He went to Metropolitan;
he went to Sugarland, where he kissed a few people on the dance floor. He got
pretty drunk, and his body felt all gross. He got a text a little after one
a.m., from Tyler Flowers. He wrote: “Your girl Alexandra made my night, I owe
you one, xo.” He’d run into John’s coworker Alexandra at a fashion party.

The next day John called Alexandra. I wanted to
hear about your night with Tyler Flowers. Tell me the story, he said. Oh, she
said. I was leaving the Charlotte Ronson party at like twelve thirty or one with
my friend, and as I walked out this guy was shouting my name, Alexandra,
Alexandra! And she looked at him and thought, who are you? And he was like, oh,
I’m Tyler, and I’m also John’s friend. They talked for a few minutes. Tyler was
with some guy.

Did it look like a date? John asked. It didn’t
strike me as a date because the other guy was pretty ugly, Alexandra said.
Short, glasses, swarthy. Plus, no vibe. Oh my God, I haven’t seen John in
forever, in like a month, Tyler said. Well, you should just IM him, he’s on IM
all day, she said. Then he said something about how he couldn’t get into the
party so Alexandra and her friend gave the two of them their wristbands.

John figured he got the text for cover. Like,
Tyler’s “early morning”? Not so early apparently. So Tyler was front-dooring
the
fact that Alexandra would probably tell John about Tyler being out.

But then, in talking it over with Fred, they
decided that maybe Tyler was just completely oblivious.

“That asshole,” Chad said when he heard about
this.

So John hadn’t responded to the last two texts.
Then on Monday he got an email from Tyler. It went like: How about we get
together this week? I still haven’t seen “Julie and Julia.” We work close
together, I’m at 24th and 6th. See you soon, Tyler.

So John wrote back, like a day later: Sure. How
about Thursday.

Tyler wrote something back, like, Thursday sounds
great, and supposedly there’s something fun at Galapagos?

And John wrote back: Out there? You? I’ll believe
it when I see it! And he mentioned there was some HBO party that night too, and
there’d be free drinks and stuff and they could start there.

And Tyler wrote back: Can you bring a date?

And John wrote back: Yes, but it looks a little
crappy, but it could be fun.

Tyler wrote back: “Or you can ask Alexandra if
there are any cool fashion shows. J’adore models.”

John didn’t respond. J’adore models! Really. Then
an hour later, Tyler wrote: “Whatever we do will be fun! Can’t wait to catch
up.”

John thought this last email was pretty nice.

THE THING ABOUT
not thinking about a bad thing was that when you tried not to think about
it, then all you could do was think about it, until, finally, the brain slipped,
and then you succeeded, you actually didn’t think about it anymore, except that
didn’t last forever. Then a moment would come when you’d sit up in bed in a
horror in the dark, and you couldn’t help but think about it. But then you’d
try
to comfort yourself back to sleep, and then you’d forget again.

EDWARD WAS SUPPOSED
to live with Amy for October. But that had fallen through. So was
this never going to happen? They hadn’t seen each other in two weeks. What would
he do for money? Edward was making like 250 dollars a week, maybe a little less.
Was he going to save up for an apartment with that? He needs to move to the
City, John thought. He kept going back and forth to his parents’ house.

The thing about getting to know someone was that it
took so long to understand what they were really like from the inside, from
their side.

John and Chad were going to throw a birthday party,
and Edward was going to just happen to be in town. Diego kept saying he was a
“maybe” because of John. John hoped everyone would show up, and by “everyone,”
he meant everyone to whom he had a lingering romantic attachment. They’d all
take Adderall, a popular drug that helped you pay attention.