boring she must find me if she preferred such a lukewarm gloop of a guy to me. Someday, when we have kids… though he’d said it half jokingly, my blood had gone cold. He was just the kind of loser you could see hauling around a diaper bag and loads of padded baby equipment.… I berated myself for not being more forceful with her, though in truth there was no way I could have pursued her any harder without at least a tiny bit of encouragement on her end. Already it was embarrassing enough: Hobie’s tact whenever her name came up, the careful flatness in his voice. Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment. Even a cow like Mrs. Vogel could see it. It wasn’t as if Pippa had led me on—quite the contrary; if she cared anything about me she would have come back to New York instead of staying in Europe after school; and still for whatever dumb reason I couldn’t let go of the way she’d looked at me the day when I first came to visit, sitting on the side of her bed. The memory of that childhood afternoon had sustained me for years; it was as if—sick with loneliness for my mother—I’d imprinted on her like some orphaned animal; when in fact, joke on me, she’d been doped up and knocked lamb-daffy from a head injury, ready to throw her arms around the first stranger who’d walked in.
My “opes” as Jerome called them were in an old tobacco tin. On the marble top of the dresser I crushed one of my hoarded old-style Oxycontins, cut it and drew it into lines with my Christie’s card and—rolling the crispest bill in my wallet—leaned to the table, eyes damp with anticipation: ground zero, bam, bitter taste in the back of the throat and then the gust of relief, falling backward on the bed as the sweet old punch hit me square in the heart: pure pleasure, aching and bright, far from the tin-can clatter of misery.
vii.
THE NIGHT OF MY dinner at the Barbours was rainwhipped and stormy, with blasting winds so strong I could scarcely get my umbrella up. On Sixth Avenue there were no cabs to be had, pedestrians head-down and shouldering into sideways rain; in the humid, bunker-like damp of the subway platform, drips plinked monotonously from the concrete ceiling.
When I emerged, Lexington Avenue was deserted, raindrops dancing and prickling on the sidewalks, a smashing rain that seemed to amplify all the noise on the streets. Taxis lashed by in loud sprays of water. A few doors from the station I ducked into a market to buy flowers—lilies, three bunches since one was too puny; in the tiny, overheated shop their fragrance hit me exactly the wrong way and only at the cash register did I realize why: their scent was the same sick, unwholesome sweetness of my mother’s memorial service. As I ducked out again and ran the flooded sidewalk to Park Avenue—socks squelching, cold rain pelting in my face—I regretted I’d bought them at all and came close to tossing them in a trash can, only the squalls of rain were so fierce I couldn’t bring myself to slow down, for even a moment, and ran on.
As I stood in the vestibule—my hair plastered to my head, my supposedly waterproof raincoat sopping like I’d soaked it in the bathtub—the door opened quite suddenly to a large, open-faced college kid that it took me a pulse or two to recognize as Toddy. Before I could apologize for the water streaming off me, he embraced me solidly with a clap on the back.
“Oh my God,” he was saying as he led me into the living room. “Let me take your coat—and these, Mum will love them. Awesome to see you! How long has it been?” He was larger and more robust than Platt, with un-Barbour like hair of a darker, cardboard-colored blond and a very un-Barbour like smile on him as well—eager and bright with no irony about it.
“Well—” His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness. “It’s been a long time. You must be in college now, right?”
“Yes—Georgetown—up for the weekend. I’m studying political science but really I’m hoping to go into nonprofit management maybe, something to do with