Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,23

the first shift we worked together. He was handsome and hilarious, with a sexy British accent and a flawlessly hetero shield. He told me he’d been born in Lahore, but moved when he was three to London.

‘Northeast London?’ I asked, because he sounded exactly like a friend I’d had in Paris from there.

‘Yeah, Redbridge. Who are you, Henry Higgins?’

He said he became English at age nine when he switched schools and changed his name from Haroon to Harry. ‘My skin magically lightened. It was quite a trick. After that I was just one of the lads.’

Over dessert I planned to tell him about Luke, tell him that I wasn’t ready to date yet. But when the panna cotta arrived he mentioned an ex, named Albert. I was floored. Later we called it the panna cotta revelation.

‘Who?’ I say now.

‘This Silas fellow.’

‘Shit, I hope not. You can have him if he is.’

‘A writer? No thanks.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t want someone who’s all up in here all the time.’ He waves his fingers around his glossy black hair. ‘I like a thruster. Writers aren’t thrusters. Not the good ones. And I couldn’t be with a bad writer. God, that would be awful.’ Ooful is how he says it. He goes off to drop a check at his deuce. ‘Plus,’ he says when he comes back, ‘I want to be the wordsmith. I like to dominate, verbally. Your three-top wants hot tea. Tell them it’s ninety degrees outside and their lips are going to melt like wax.’

Marcus comes out of the office while I’m dropping the tea and Harry’s taking an order and finds our bowls of vichyssoise. ‘I’m not ever scheduling you two together again.’ He always says that. It makes us feel about six years old. We make faces at each other behind his back.

When I get home that night, late—there was an anniversary party for sixty-one in the downstairs dining room — Silas is on my machine.

‘Casey, I’m sorry. I had to leave town. For a while. I’m not sure how long.’ His mouth is really close to the receiver, cars whipping by behind him. ‘I’m sorry to miss our date tomorrow. I really am. It’s the one thing that. I don’t know. I barely know you. But. I had to. I had to go. Anyway, I’ll call you when I get back. Don’t. Well, I can’t really. Take care of yourself.’ There was a pause and then, ‘Shit,’ and the receiver crashed into the cradle.

‘Another fucking flake,’ I say to Muriel. ‘Could be a family emergency or something.’

‘It wasn’t. He was like, uh, had to leave town, uh, for a while. No idea how long.’

She looks at me doubtfully.

‘I’d like to meet a guy who wants what he says he wants. No more “I’m just moving slowly” or “I just need to go away for a really vague amount of time.” Jesus.’

‘Don’t write Silas off.’

‘I’m totally writing him off.’

‘I’m going to show you a story he wrote.’

‘Don’t. I do not want to see it.’

Muriel says she doesn’t want my Friday night off to go to waste, and she invites some people over to her place for dinner.

Harry swaps a shift with Yasmin and comes with me. He flirts madly with all the straight guys. He’s gone off gay men, he says. It went badly in Provincetown with the new busboy. Muriel serves Moroccan chicken, couscous, and sangria. She’s spread a batik cloth over her couch.

‘Very multicultural bohème,’ Harry says.

Most of Muriel’s friends are writers, real writers, not like my old friends who got over it like the flu. She’s put the food buffet style on her desk, which she covered with a sari and pulled out from the wall. I fill my plate next to a guy who calls himself Jimbo and had a novel published last year. Motorcycle Mama. It received mixed reviews, Muriel told me, but he got a six-figure contract for the next one anyway.

‘Beware the murky bowl of unidentifiable forcemeats,’ Jimbo says, nudging my shoulder with his. I can tell he doesn’t know if we’ve met—or slept together—before. We haven’t done either, and I ignore him. ‘Rudy,’ he says with unnecessary volume in my ear to a guy on my other side. ‘This looks like what we used to get at the A.D. on Pepe’s night off.’ In case there are people who don’t know he went to Harvard. He moves on bellowing through the room.

The only other person there who has published a