The following day, Sunday, the day before I started my job at GQ, I drifted around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Somehow, I had never been to the Met before. During the last two summers in New York, when I wasn’t operating the microfiche reader at work (I had an internship that involved copying grant information from microfiche files of philanthropic foundations’ tax returns), my free time had been occupied with a guy whom I’ll call Kevin. Kevin was older than I by nearly a decade, and he lived in deepest Brooklyn. He was a writer of sorts, an unwavering Harold Brodkey fan, a gifted visual artist, an outstanding impromptu chef (give him leftover chicken, some heavy cream, and a humble spice you’d never thought of before like paprika, and Kevin could produce a masterpiece), and the person who explained to me the provenance of the name Steely Dan. We all have that person in our lives.
But I hadn’t spoken with Kevin in nearly a year, since I’d had what I’d briefly believed to be a medical emergency. In summary, I had fallen off a table at a nightclub, the Roxy, and thought I’d broken a rib. It’s an embarrassing story, and there’s not much else to it (and know that I had been, as usual, substance-free that night): I had gone out dancing with a friend from college; the theme song to The Jeffersons came on; to express my enthusiasm, I climbed up onto a high cocktail table, lost my footing, and fell on something bad (bench? boulder?). Whatever had happened, it hurt.
When I got back to my dorm early that morning, still in tears—or a new set in the same series—I called Kevin for advice.
“Go to the emergency room at Saint Vincent’s,” he said, and paused.
Saint Vincent’s was the only hospital in the Village; throughout the years, it ministered to the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, homeless people, AIDS patients, and 9/11 victims. Dylan Thomas died there. The hospital is gone now, lost to history and luxury condos.
“I have to get off the phone now,” Kevin said. “I’m eating a muffin.”
So that was Kevin. But so was this: before the Roxy incident, I had been thinking about taking a class in college on Vladimir Nabokov. I wanted Kevin’s opinion about this intriguing Russian. If Kevin had said, Nabokov sucks, or Nabokov? Never heard of him, it is very possible that I would not have taken the class. But instead Kevin said, “If you like well-written prose, which you do, you will love Nabokov.”
It seems important to keep reminding yourself that everything you say, no matter how minor the utterance seems to you, has the power to change someone’s life. Some little throwaway comment, even one from sour old you, can have consequences that reverberate, for better or for worse, throughout a lifetime.
And so here I was, returning now to New York in mini-triumph, to begin a coveted job at this men’s magazine I’d known nothing about until a month ago. And I was contentedly alone. Without a guy around, you could do great things that you’d always wanted to do, like go to the Met for an afternoon in lush late spring. Guys, I was starting to understand, took up a lot of time. There’d been Kevin, and there’d been some guys in college, but what was the point, really? The most important thing in the world is for the mind to be free. When the mind is allowed to investigate for itself, other freedoms follow—or at least they should.
I spent a couple of hours wandering around the eighteenth-century European galleries. I stood before paintings by François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, wishing I could step into the pictures and idle with their frivolous youths and rosy cherubim, swing with them on their fabulous swings. The translation of myself into different mental states and worlds always came so easily for me. I loved the eighteenth century and revered everything about the period—the sumptuousness and the social theater of it, the dream of the Enlightenment and its goal of understanding the world through reason (there is a truth, said the Enlightenment, and an untruth)—and I’d always felt that in some weird, deep way I got this time already. George Orwell, who was otherwise right about pretty much everything, said while the past is always with you, it has no reality. I’m not so sure about that. It’s hard to explain, but the past has always been so very present for me—it doesn’t take too much for me to actually be there.
I had lunch alone at the marvelous old first-floor cafeteria in the Met, designed in the fifties by Dorothy Draper. There were dramatic columns and enormous golden birdcage chandeliers big enough to crawl inside. But why was I thinking of enclosures? Of my mental landscape then, it certainly must be true that I imagined that the self was a fundamentally private one, shaped in isolation, and maybe it was.
After lunch, I took myself on a walk north along Fifth Avenue and Central Park. Something was happening across the street, some sort of human commotion, at Eighty-Fifth Street. Although my usual instinct whenever I see a crowd is to get as far from it as possible, I found myself going toward this particular herd.
This, it turned out, was Jacqueline Onassis’s building. When I was back in Ohio, packing, preparing myself for whatever this new life of mine in New York would be, cable news had been ghoulishly consumed with a 24/7 Jackie deathwatch. Now here I was with these formations of people, united in one brow of woe, and milling around on the sidewalk outside her apartment building. Placed around the long flower beds were tributes of the floral and Hallmark variety, cellophane offerings, the odd homemade trinket, stuffed animals. There were overheard comments (“she was my mother’s favorite,” as if Mrs. Onassis were a thing to be owned); there were midwestern-looking folks with, yes, fanny packs, standing with arms crossed in solemn consideration of those deli flowers.
The whole scene felt very creepy to me, but I couldn’t have told you why that was then; it’s hard to make these sorts of value judgments (one person’s pathos is another person’s crude sentimentality), but such public lamentations really did feel excessive. Did any of these sidewalk comminglers actually know the great woman? Well, no, of course not, so this communal distress must surely have contained a theatrical dimension—how can public grief over a celebrity death be about anything else other than yourself?
Or maybe that wasn’t right. Maybe we use public grief as an excuse to express some of the private heartbreak we all live with, because we all know that pain is never overcome but is something that just sits there like a scab.
But there was another thing I didn’t like about it: living a life onstage, as Jacqueline Onassis so spectacularly had, also meant having a death there. That seemed too great a price.
At the Eighty-Sixth and Lexington subway stop, I bought enough subway tokens to get me through my first week at work. I took the train downtown, to SoHo, and, with the money my parents had given me so that I might survive until my first paycheck, purchased luxury footwear: a pair of black Robert Clergerie platform boots and a pair of blue suede Prada wedges. Of the boots, the salesman said, “All of the top girls are wearing these”; of the wedges, another salesman at another store wrote on his business card: “Now ‘Go Get ’Em’ at GQ!! In a year from now, YOU will be on the cover!! (MY PREDICTION).”
I’ve always been fatally susceptible to any sales pitch agreeable to my self-image.
Whatever minuscule leftover parental sum I still had was spent on prepared foods at the old Balducci’s, with its beautiful outsized green awnings, on Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street—yet another stop in what I somehow assumed would magically be the upward-mobility train. That was dinner. I made calls on the pay phone in the basement of my dorm: my parents, a couple of friends back home, and my professor who started the whole thing.