All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,6

“You’d best bundle that thing up.” He motions disapprovingly at my parka. “We need to get you some warmer clothes.”

I smile. “Maurice, my friend, you do not want to know how much this parka cost. It damn well better keep me warm.”

As though on cue, a gust of wind rises as we exit the revolving door, making it quite hard to revolve, even with both of us pushing. Maurice is wearing an “I told you so” expression as he opens the rear door for me. He is too adorable. I wouldn’t put up with such bullshit if he were not.

The true bustle of a New York morning has not yet begun: the only signs of life on Park Avenue are a few hearty joggers making their way toward Central Park and an old man sweeping away debris in front of the French bakery across the street. This is my favorite time of day in the city. Sometimes I ask Maurice to drive down Fifth Avenue, just so I can look out the car windows and see the peacefulness. There is nothing in the world more serene than an empty thoroughfare.

“Any stops before the office?” Maurice asks as he slides into the driver’s seat.

“Not today, thanks.”

The television in the rear console of the limousine is tuned to CNN and I am staring at the crawl when my bag begins to vibrate. I realize I am receiving a call, which is strange, because no one ever calls before eight in the morning. I dig out my BlackBerry and the moment I see the number I know immediately who it is and why she is calling. I do not answer the phone.

“Anything special going on?” Maurice asks from the front.

“Nothing at all,” I reply.

Only now I am not telling the truth. That phone call was from my mother, with whom I have not spoken in over a month. But I know why she is calling. I glance at the date in the banner across the top of the Wall Street Journal and realize I am right. I hadn’t even thought of it all morning long.

“Hey, Maurice, you’d better be nice to me today,” I say.

“Why would I start that now?” he asks.

“Because today is my birthday,” I tell him. “And it’s a big one. Believe it or not, today I am forty years old.”

BROOKE

SO, SCOTT IS TURNING forty next month.

It’s hard for me to believe.

He is still so much the boy who took me to Van Halen concerts, and did Jell-O shots at McSorley’s, and knew where to get excellent cocaine at a time when that was useful information. He is still very much that boy, only now that boy is a man. A man who held our babies so delicately in his strong hands. A man who rises before five every morning and travels all over the country and often sleeps in airport lounges but never misses a recital or a baseball game and, best of all, never behaves as though he is a hero for any of it. He is a man who can discipline his children without yelling, run a marathon to commemorate a birthday, and still seduce his wife with a well-timed wink.

Don’t get me wrong; he isn’t perfect. I don’t mean to suggest he is. Like all men he is still a boy and boys are always trouble—especially the dreamy ones. The first time he met Mother, she pulled me aside and said: “I’d be worried about this one.” And I asked why, and she said: “The really handsome ones are always dangerous.” And he is. He makes me swoon. He still has those dancing blue eyes and wavy hair; his face looks hardly at all different from the way it did fifteen years ago. Maybe younger, in fact, since having his eyes fixed—sometimes it takes me a moment to recognize him in old photos with those Coke-bottle lenses he used to wear. So he isn’t perfect, but he still makes me laugh and he still makes me quiver after seventeen years together; I think that’s pretty good.

And if he, in fact, does look younger than he did when we were in our twenties, I haven’t done so badly either. I may not look just as I did—mostly I see it in the lines in my face, especially around the mouth—but the way I look at those crevices is they were dug slowly and surely from all the smiles I have smiled in my life, and so I