Kane Street to the bicycle path that ran along Columbia Street toward Red Hook in one direction and Brooklyn Heights in the other. Deciding which direction to go seemed like a life choice, very Robert Frost, arbitrary yet not. It might mean everything. Red Hook had a reputation for being cool, full of young men with beards making furniture out of salvaged barns and deer antlers, distilling their own barrels of rye, tending beehives on their roofs, or painstakingly smoking cuts of meat from locally sourced livestock. Roy turned right, toward Brooklyn Heights, a staid and pretty residential neighborhood. The sun warmed the path in that direction, beckoning him. Black and White Black and White. The title did nothing but make him feel anxious. Gold would be better. Gold, like the sun. Gold was glamorous and provocative and wide open to interpretation. Gold. Yes, he could change it. There was time. He didn’t even have a contract for this book, because he hadn’t written anything. There was always plenty of time. The problem was putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and writing something.
Joggers whooshed by him, music blaring from the white pods in their ears, their rhythmic footfalls marching out a mixed tune of Zen and impatience. Roy never felt the least bit guilty amidst the exercising throng. He was trim, in a middle-aged, fleshy sort of way. His clothes from his thirties, when he used to cycle around London all the time, still fit. He was proud of that.
He continued down the bicycle path toward the piers that had been transformed into a sprawling, modern waterside park. There were creatively designed play areas for children—rocky water parks, dangerous-looking rope swings, towering slides, a gigantic soccer pitch, basketball courts, a roller-skating rink, barbecue areas, grassy knolls and beaches, docks for sailboats and kayaks, dog runs, a bridge made of rope and wood, and benches facing New York Harbor and the endlessly entertaining view of the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan off to the right, Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty off to the left. Roy had taken numerous photos of the sunset from there when they’d first moved, and sent them to his young agent in London. She’d assumed he’d used an effect of some kind on his camera. It was that breathtaking.
Lower Manhattan was all tall, sleek steel and glass. Wendy’s office was in one of those buildings. The Brooklyn Bridge hung majestically over the sun-dappled water, as if suspended invisibly from a more old-fashioned place, where everything existed in tones of sepia and brown. He’d read the bridge’s story, how people had died building it, how the men had wanted to give up and the women had shown their mettle. It was the type of story a more ambitious writer might incorporate into a sweeping mega-saga.
Whether they knew the bridge’s story or not, a never-ending queue of tourists tramped across it from Manhattan with no objective except maybe to eat a good slice of Brooklyn pizza. It always alarmed him how many of them there were. Roy turned away from the bridge and circled back toward Cobble Hill. The skyline lowered and his confidence returned. He walked up Congress Street, across Hicks Street and then Henry Street, and into Cobble Hill Park.
It was a tiny, pretty, stop-and-rest sort of park, with carefully tended flowers and protective old trees. A generous number of wooden benches beckoned to him: “Write here!” But writing on a laptop out of doors never worked. The sun glared from the screen and made his eyes tear. He was always too hot or too cold. The benches were hard. There were mosquitoes, barking dogs, screaming toddlers.
He kept walking. A couple of blocks down Henry was a bar he’d passed many times and never gone into. The Horn and Duck was closer to home, but the food was too pretentious—they made their own ketchup; Heinz was better—and the staff were too chatty. He never got anything done there. This bar looked quiet.
Monte—that was the name of the bar. Not Monte’s, just Monte, with a Budweiser light glowing tiredly in the window. It was barely noon, but the bar was open. Roy pushed open the smudged glass door and went inside.
“Morning,” a cheerful woman with dimples in her cheeks greeted him from behind a set of drums at the back. “Don’t mind me.” She wasn’t drumming; she was looking at her phone.
“Not at all.” Roy chose a green vinyl–cushioned stool at the bar and