“So, you were drinking,” I say. I’m stern when I say this, like I’m scolding her, but I’m thinking of Katie licking salt off of her hand and doing a tequila shot and smiling at me.
“A little. I wasn’t drunk or anything, Tom. But, after a while, I started to feel like it might be time to go. And so I said good-bye. But then he touched my leg. He set his hand right here on my thigh, like you used to do in the car when we were driving.”
Her eyes are watery, glistening in our reading lamps.
“He touched you?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“What did it feel like?”
“It felt good. It felt really, really good. But I knew that it was wrong. He shouldn’t be touching me. Only you can touch me. And so I told him that I had to go. He asked me if he could go, too, to make sure I got back OK. I told him that he could.”
“You knew what he wanted though, didn’t you? Tell me that you—”
“Yes,” she says. “I knew. And . . .” For a while, she says nothing and her eyes fill again. She wipes them on one of the shoulder straps of her tank top. “When we were waiting for a cab, I decided that I was going to let it happen. I didn’t tell him that, but I knew that I was going to let him come into my room, and that I was going—”
“You were going to what, Anna?”
“Let him sleep with me.”
My heartbeat has slowed—the blood clogging in my veins—and I feel light-headed and short of breath. I can see him clearly now for the first time. My brain has filled in Allie’s picture, adding flesh to crayon, and there’s David Anderson. He’s whispering in her ear, and his hand is no longer simply resting on her thigh. It’s moving up, steadily, along the contours of my wife’s leg. “What happened?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean what do I mean? What happened?”
“Why do you want to hear this?”
“Because I have to. You think you know men, but you don’t, Anna. OK? I can’t explain it, but I need you to tell me everything right now.”
“He kissed me in the taxi.”
“Where?”
“On my neck,” she says, touching her throat. “And then just barely on the lips. Not even a real kiss—just a small one. And for a minute I couldn’t breathe at all. You and Allie. This house and our life here. They didn’t matter to me. I just wanted him.”
“Anna, what happened?” I ask, again.
I can see that she understands now. She takes a breath and it comes out shaky, and she knows that she’s going to tell me everything. And maybe she needs to say it as much as I need to hear it. A tear streams down her cheek, landing on her bare arm. “He got out of the cab with me, and he followed me into the hotel. I didn’t ask him to, but I didn’t ask him
not
to, either. He just did. We went up the elevator with some other people, and he touched my hand and I had to close my eyes. And all of the sudden, when I put my key card in the door and made it beep, we were kissing.”
I put my hand on Anna’s as she talks. I want her to stop, but I can’t let her stop. This . . .
this
is the point of no return now. It’s like watching a tragic event over and over again until you can feel it in your chest. I think of Katie again—of the exhilarating strangeness of her little body under me.
Listening to Anna is my punishment for that.
“I lay down on the bed and he lay on top of me. That weight, you know, it feels good. Women need that weight sometimes. It, it reminds us that we’re alive. He asked me. He said, ‘Do you want this?’ and I told him that I did. Because I did. I wanted to be fucked. I wanted to feel that again. And so he took his shirt off, and then he took my shirt off. And he kissed me.”
“Where?”
“Do you really want to know this?”
“Where did he kiss you?”
She wipes her eyes and clears her throat. “Here,” she says, touching her breast over her tank top. Through the thin material, I can see the faint shadow of her nipple.
“Where else?”
She moves to her inner thigh, tracing her finger upward. Then she lifts the front of her shirt and draws a circle around her navel. “And here.”
I’ve grown hard so fast that I’m almost unaware of it. Katie is there again, vivid against the front lobe of my brain, her back arched and her little moans in my mouth. But then she’s gone, and there’s only Anna sitting in this bed next to me.
“Did you touch him?” I ask.
She blinks at me. “No. I didn’t want to touch him, or do anything to him. I just wanted to be taken. I wanted him to want me so badly that I didn’t have to do anything at all.”
“What happened then?”
She breathes again. Two big, slow breaths. “I took off my underwear and we were both naked. And I lay there with my arms back over my head and my eyes closed. And I felt his mouth on me, and I had to bite my lip because I was afraid I’d yell.”
“Where was his mouth?” My hand is on her leg now, running my fingers along the back of her knee.
“You know where,” she says. A small sob escapes, but she fights it back.
“And then what?”
“He was on top of me again. And I could feel him against me. And I wanted him inside of me. I was waiting for it. But then he stopped.”
“He stopped? Why?”
“Because I was crying. I think it scared him.”
“Why were you crying?”
She looks at the ceiling, her eyes on the thin cobwebs at the corner of the room. “I didn’t want to.”
“Want to what?”
“I didn’t want to be the person that I’d be if I let him fuck me.” She closes her eyes and my hand is resting on her hipbone. “I didn’t want to be alone. I knew if I let him . . . I knew that’s what I’d eventually be. I’d be alone . . . like Curtis.”
“Alone,” I say. I pull her shorts down and kiss her belly, biting her skin gently. I slide my hand up her shirt and run my palm in smooth, slow circles over her breast. She breathes out, just a whisper, and desire, like need, wells again in my stomach. I have seen every centimeter of her body a thousand times, but tonight I’m seeing it through the eyes of another man. David Anderson looked at her, this long, skinny thing on a hotel bed, and wanted her. He’d dreamed about her and fantasized about her as he sat in his office talking about rates of return and other people’s money. He wanted nothing more than to fuck my wife, and that’s what I want, too.
I kiss her deeply, and our tongues sink into each other. She pulls her tank top over her head and I’m on top of her in a frantic rush. Anna is stronger than Katie, and she digs her heels into my lower back, pressing me as close as two people can be, and it feels absolutely right.
“Get these off,” she says, gripping the waist of my jeans, and I do as I’m told.
Our bodies are perfectly in sync, as perfect as they’ve ever been. When I’m inside of her, she calls out the way she did the first time, back when there was no one to hide from. No children in the house. No dogs watching from the floor. And no lonely, brilliant fathers in the other room.
C
olumbia University is
one of those schools that make you wish you hadn’t been such a dipshit when you were eighteen. Unlike the sprawling, suburban state campus of my college years, this place is tucked behind a big gray wall right in the middle of the coolest city on earth. It’s difficult not to somehow idealize the students here with their iPods and cool jeans, because they all seem to look exactly the way I wish I would’ve looked back then—intellectual and worldly, like they might say something devastating and subversive at any second with their exotic majors and far-flung ideas about how the rest of their lives might go. Most eighteen- and twenty-year-olds don’t read a word of prose beyond magazines or Perez Hilton, but these kids are obviously different—our world’s final hope for literacy. As Curtis, Sonya, and I step into the big courtyard on Center Campus, there’s a troop of them, maybe a hundred or so, standing together along the pathway leading to Low Library. My guess is that they represent much of Columbia’s writing program.
“Uh-oh,” I say. “It’s a riot.”
It’s a beautiful fall day in New York, one of those days where all of the things you don’t like about Manhattan seem silly and you wonder how you could possibly live anywhere else. In the car on the way here, Curtis and I shared some bourbon from the minibar, and we’re both smiling like two guys who’ve been drinking bourbon before noon. Sonya squeezes my elbow. “They’re here for your father, dear.”
And, of course, they are. When they see him, there’s a quick flurry of clicks from digital cameras and iPhones. There will probably be a few other famous writers here today, but Curtis is who got them here on a perfect Saturday afternoon. About half of them are carrying books, used copies of his novels that they’ve studied in class and underlined and argued about over lattes late at night.
“I should go say hi,” says Curtis. “They’ll probably be the most interesting people I talk to today.”
“By all means,” says Sonya as he leaves us standing in the shade of an impressive white building.
“Oh for the love of God. It’s hardly noon,” says Curtis, shouting to the small crowd. “Aren’t you people in college? Shouldn’t you be hungover in your dorms somewhere?” They laugh and smile and some of the kids clap their hands. He pulls a pen from his pocket and begins signing their books and notebooks. It’s clear to see that he’s every bit as excited to see them as they are to see him.
“Do fans always show up to this thing?”
Sonya shrugs and reminds me that she’s been to as exactly as many Pulitzer Prize award luncheons as I have. I haven’t seen her in a while, and she looks great. She’s a year or two younger than Curtis, but it could easily be a decade. She’s one of those older women in this city who remains perpetually youthful by dressing cool and lining up with twenty-five–year-olds each morning for yoga. She’s in a black skirt suit and silver heels and I remember why I had such a big crush on her when I was twelve.
“Brandon’s still coming, right?” I ask.
“He said he was meeting us here, but who knows? He’s probably in some alley with that tattoo artist doing God knows what.”
I get the sense that she’s playing the part of the disappointed Jewish mother here. We all have roles to play in our families.
A girl in faded, hip-hugger jeans and a Yankees hoodie screams and hugs my dad. She’s young and pretty with smart-girl glasses and so my dad hugs her back while another girl takes their picture. These kids—all of them—remind me so much of Katie that I feel myself reaching for my phone. It would take me five seconds to text her, and then she’d text back, but I’ve promised myself that I won’t.
“He seems happier lately,” says Sonya. “It couldn’t be more obvious.”
“He’s getting the Pulitzer today. I’d be happy, too.”
She gives me a look—one I’ve received from my mother many times. “He’s
happy
, silly boy, because of you guys.
You
especially. Being your father has always been one of his favorite things to be. He was afraid to admit that when he was younger. I think he always thought it made him sound too suburban. God forbid.” She winks at me and smiles.
We look back at Curtis, posing with four kids in a picture. “Maybe,” I say. “But it looks like his other favorite thing to be is a famous writer.”
“Yeah, there’s definitely more money in that.”
Over her shoulder, a familiar man catches my eye. He’s walking toward us with determined purpose in a dark suit. Like my dad, he wears his suit a little faded and misshapen, more like an academic than an executive. He’s fidgeting with a tuft of hair, pulling it across a bald spot as he squints against the sun in the cloudless sky. Whoever he is, he doesn’t look particularly happy.
“Hello, Sonya,” the man says.
“Well, how are you, Alistair?” Her voice is chilly, and now I remember. This is Alistair Stewart, the fiction editor at the
New Yorker
. By sheer lineage, I feel a culpable sense of guilt. My father has been sleeping with this man’s wife off and on for twenty years.
“So, he finally won the goddamn thing, huh?”
“He did indeed. It was bound to happen eventually.”
“Pretty big award for a bunch of reissued stories,” says Alistair. “Did he need to buy a new condo or something?” He lights a cigarette and coughs dramatically. Thirty feet away, my dad is signing books and asking a girl about her nose ring. The look on Alistair’s face is practiced hatred. “We got a few reader copies down at the office. They’re great for keeping fire doors open.”
Sonya smiles, above it all. “Well, they’re pretty good stories, Al, even if they never quite made it into the
New Yorker
.”
“We go for relevant, Sonya. Curtis hasn’t been relevant in years. This award should have gone to Nicholas Zuckerman. Every literate person in America knows it.”
And then Alistair sizes me up.
“My wife and I are big fans of your magazine,” I say. “Especially the movie reviews and cartoons.”
That tuft of hair flips up from his head again and he grunts at me before charging off with his cigarette.
“Well, he seems nice,” I say.
“I doubt Curtis will be invited to the
New Yorker
Festival this year.”
At the steps of the library, we’re rejoined by Curtis, who smells, I realize, a little like bourbon, which means I probably do, too. “What’d old Al have to say?” he asks.
“He was just wishing you well,” says Sonya. “He sends his best as always.”
A few well-dressed people pass by, taking note of my dad. He puts his arm around me and gives my shoulders a good shake. “If things get ugly in there, I’m going to need you to be my bodyguard, OK? Personally, I’d hit him in the jaw . . . he’ll go down like a bag of sand.”
Inside the Low Library’s main lobby, there are about two hundred people milling around, and it dawns on me that many of them are here to accept their own Pulitzers. From investigative reporters to local journalists from cities I’ve never visited to war correspondents and jazz musicians, they’ve all accomplished something great. Still though, the temperature in this big marble room changes as everyone slowly begins to notice that my dad has arrived.
A thin man in a brown suit identifies himself from the
Times
. “Curtis, how does it feel to finally be taking home the big one?”
Curtis looks at Sonya. “Oh, you’re right. I guess I haven’t won this one before, have I? We’re going to have to start charging my students more, I suppose.”
The reporter laughs, and as he begins asking my dad about the progress of his newest novel, I realize that this could go on for a while, and so I drift off toward a big round table at the center of the room where people are finding their seat assignments. Through the loitering crowd there’s a big, open space, like an empty hall moments before a wedding reception. That’s where I find Brandon, at a table near the front, sitting alone over a glass of Coke. He appears to be in physical pain.
“Waiter, I think this man has I had enough,” I say. There’s no waiter there, of course, I’m just being funny.
“Jesus, remind me again why this thing isn’t at night,” he says. “What is it, seven o’clock in the morning?”
We give each other a quick bro hug, slapping backs. “You smell hungover,” I say.
“Well, you smell like bourbon, so we’re even.”
“Our mothers would be so proud of us. All right, let’s both agree right now not to hug anyone for the rest of the day.”
“Deal.”
He’s sporting some baggage under his eyes, and there’s more forehead there than last time I saw him, but he looks nice in his black suit and open-collared shirt. I pull at my own blue tie, and, ironically, I wish I
hadn’t
worn it. I was never meant to be a tie guy. “Rough night?” I ask.
“They’re all rough nowadays. Acting twenty-two when you’re thirty-two takes a lot out of a girl. We’re not as young as we used to be, Tommy Violet.” He gulps his soda hard, as if the physical effort required to speak has left him dangerously dehydrated.
“Dude, you haven’t been young in years. You’re just better at faking it.”
“Hush your mouth. If you knew how much I spent on eye cream you’d fall right out of that Banana Republic suit of yours.”
I take a sip from one of the nine water glasses at the table. It’s lukewarm and the ice has dissolved into little jellyfish-looking slivers at the brim. I’m playing it cool, like someone who doesn’t want to blurt out,
Did you read my novel yet, you asshole?
“How’s work? The wife and kid?”
“I just got fired the other day. I think my old company’s gonna sue me.”
“It’s just as well,” he says. “You don’t need some sell-out job anyway. If you smarten up and let me take care of your pretty little ass we’ll make so much money together we’ll be able to buy all the Banana Republic suits we want.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” I ask. “I don’t speak gay.”
“What it means, Thomas
Ferris
, is that I read your book. And, aside from a stunning lack of tits or ass, I think it’s pretty fucking great. But, if you want to make some
real
money, you’re gonna swallow whatever overly dramatic artistic bullshit pride you’re trying to cling to and let me put your
real
goddamn name on it.”
Background noise has dissolved into a steady white hum as I play back what he just said in my mind.
Pretty fucking great
. It’d be more thrilling if I weren’t about 51 percent certain I’d just hallucinated the entire thing. “Well, what kind of money are we talking about if I stick with Thomas Ferris?”
Brandon pantomimes sadness.
When we were kids, we used to put on little plays for his mom and dad on weekends. He’d always insist on playing whatever character was the saddest, because it was the only emotion that fit his natural aesthetic. “Let’s see, a complex little dramedy lit novel with no tits or ass from a no-named white boy named Thomas Ferris? I could probably get you enough for a nice dinner out at the nearest Olive Garden. No dessert though. Is it hot in here? Why is it always so fucking hot when I’m hungover?”
I drink some more lukewarm water. “But you liked it though, right?”
“Look at you, all handsome and vulnerable. It’s good, Tommy, I promise. You’re a
real
fucking writer, it turns out. Cards on the table here, I was pretty sure it was gonna suck it. No offense, but lit brats can never actually write. But this,
man
, is good stuff. It’s like Violet 101, all Americana and thinly veiled metaphors. And I can sell the holy shit out of it. Regardless of the name on the cover. But, if you insist on being an idiot, can’t we at least change your name to something good? Maybe brown you up a little? Mohammad Bhatia? Hector Julio Hernandez maybe? Nobody’s reading honkies anymore. Especially male honkies. Thomas Ferris sounds like some secondary fucker in
The
fucking
Great Gatsby
. Some blond asshole with a trust fund lounging by the pool.”
“Are you finished?”
“For the moment.”
“Good. Then I think we should stick with Thomas Ferris.”
I’d like to run around the table with my arms up and give everyone in the room a high five. However, it’s hard not to have this tempered by the fact that Brandon is the second person this week to (a) be surprised that my book isn’t terrible, and (b) tell me that it could have been written by Curtis Violet himself.
“Tell me then, Mr.
Ferris
, are we still keeping this literary venture a secret from Daddy?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Then zip it, because here he comes.”
Sonya has slid her arm inside of Curtis’s and she’s laughing. My dad found her name thirtysomething years ago on a list of literary agents at the library, and now here we are.
“Hello boys,” says Curtis.
“Well, Tom, you missed it,” she says. “Your dad just told the nice little man at the
Times
that his next book will effectively reinvent the novel and change the way people read fiction.”
“Change the way people
process
fiction,” says Curtis, correcting her. “Weren’t you even listening to me?”
“Reinvent the novel?” I say. “What does that even mean?”
“I’m not entirely sure. But it sounded nice as I was saying it. Now let’s talk about the alcohol situation here. I was under the impression that the bar would be distinctly more robust.”
Brandon clears his throat and opens his suit jacket, revealing a shiny silver flask. Apparently this is the norm for people like us. “In this economy,” he says, “you gotta bring your own bar with you.”
“Oh, Brandon,” says Sonya.
“I’ve always liked you, Brandon,” says Curtis. “You’re my kinda guy.”
The actual event is like a distant family member’s high school graduation. For about an hour, we’ve been sitting patiently, looking at all the interesting people around us, waiting for my dad’s category to be called and listening to stranger after stranger win Pulitzers. As the president of Columbia University—a man who looks startlingly like Mickey Mantle in his late middle-age—talks about each winner, I’m thinking about my book. I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I was eleven listening to my dad read at Politics & Prose in D.C. And now Brandon, an actual literary agent, has told me with almost bored certainty that that’s exactly what I’m going to be. It’s been such a shitty few weeks that it’s difficult not to see this all being pulled out from under me. Clearly I’m being punked. Ashton Kutcher is about to jump out and I’m going to punch him in the nuts.