"Hey, Rufus."
"Jimmy, I know it's late."His voice was warm and gravelly, the way it always was, like he was perpetually on the verge of offering you a plate of something."But I got a young man who does research up at Columbia, wants to see the studio tonight.Crazy schedule, and I told him I'd ask.I know you're out in six weeks and I want it rented quick."
Six weeks.My lease was up in six weeks, and I’d done exactly nothing about finding a new place.The Beacon salary had been hitting my account for a month now, a direct deposit so comically larger than anything I'd ever earned that I'd checked my banking app three times after the first one, convinced there'd been a clerical error.
"Of course, Rufus.I'm not home yet anyway."
"You're a peach.In and out in twenty minutes.Won't touch a thing."
I hung up and stared down the wet avenue.A young man from Columbia was going to walk through my four hundred square feet of cinder-block bookshelves and secondhand everything and decide whether it was worth what I paid for it, and I was standing under a deli awning with the scent of a man I'd just slept with still on my skin.
I called Jillian.
She picked up on the second ring."It's a weeknight, James.This better be good."
"Can I buy you a drink?"
A pause.Jillian Morris could read a silence the way other people read a headline.I heard the calibration happening — the rapid assessment of tone, timing, and the fact that I was calling at eleven p.m.offering to buy rather than split.
"Where?"
"You pick."
"The Ear Inn.Twenty minutes.Don't make me wait, I'm putting on real pants for this."
She hung up without saying goodbye, which meant she was already looking for the pants.
* * *
The Ear Inn was the kind of downtown bar that had been standing since before anyone drinking in it was born — a low crooked room in one of the oldest houses left in the city, dark wood, tin ceiling, framed photos of sailors and longshoremen and regulars long dead.It didn't try to impress anybody, which was exactly why it did.
A month ago, I'd have thought twice about the tab.
I turned that thought over as I slid into a scarred table near the back and ordered a bourbon — top shelf, neat, without doing the mental math I'd been doing for years.No quick calculation of how many days until payday, no silent downgrade to the well option while pretending I preferred it.I just ordered what I wanted, and when the bartender set it in front of me, I didn't flinch at the price.
I needed to find an apartment.A real one.Something with a bedroom that wasn't also the kitchen.The lease was up in six weeks, Rufus was already showing the place, and for the first time in years I could look at listings without sorting by lowest price first.
The thought should have felt like a victory.Tonight it just felt like one more thing I didn't have the bandwidth to process.
Jillian arrived in nineteen minutes, which meant she'd sprinted for the train.She dropped into the chair across from me in a City Hall staffer's version of pajamas — a Columbia sweatshirt over dress pants, hair piled on top of her head, reading glasses still perched on her nose.She glanced at my bourbon, then stared at my face and my hair, which I hadn't checked in a mirror since leaving Nelson's dressing room and which I suspected was telling a story I hadn't authorized.
"Order me whatever you're having," she said."And then tell me everything."
"Nothing happened."
Jillian took off her glasses and set them on the table with the deliberate care of a woman preparing to cross-examine a witness."James Goodman.You called me at eleven p.m.on a weeknight.You are drinking top-shelf bourbon downtown, which a month ago would have required you to sell a kidney.Your hair looks like you stuck your head out of a cab window at seventy miles an hour, and you have a mark on your neck that I am generously choosing not to identify.So I'm going to ask you one more time, and I want you to think very carefully before you answer."She leaned in."What happened?"
I took a long sip of bourbon.It burned all the way down, which was useful, because it gave me something to focus on besides the memory of Nelson's hands in my hair.
"Um, I need to find a new apartment because my lease is up,” I mumbled.“Oh, and I might have slept with Nelson."
Jillian's mouth opened.Closed.Opened again.For a woman who talked for a living — who had once filibustered a Thanksgiving dinner for forty-five minutes on the subject of subway-platform etiquette — the silence was remarkable.
"You."She pointed at me."Slept with Nelson."She pointed vaguely uptown."Nelson Mackenzie.Your anchor.Your ex-boyfriend anchor.The man you left thirteen years ago via a scrawled note."
"Thank you for the recap, Jillian, I was there."
"Where?I mean, where did this happen?"