I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment
Selected for the Guardian’s Five Great Reads, May 2026.
Fiction
In Search of Absolutely Nothing
Glimmer Train · Issue 95 · Winter 2016
1.
B,
So you’ve probably heard that I’m receiving the Roark Prize, which is the art world’s equivalent of placing their elders on ice floes and pushing them out to sea. The committee insists they can’t just mail the damn plaque or whatever it is—no, they want me to sit at their long table and regale them with my life story. I’m inclined to invent a honeysuckle-framed yard, a treehouse made of willow branches and old dresses, maybe a kind nanny, an absent father, a devout mother whom I prayed with every night. I can’t imagine surviving that sort of childhood—I was more the stowaway-on-a-pirate-ship type—but since I’ve made a career of never giving the public what they want, just this once I’d like to play along. I’ll be fifty-nine in a few days, which means I have one year before the great anti-climax, when I wake up in my seventh decade and realize I’ll never feel as old as I look, that my best stories occurred at an age when they weren’t stories, they were simply last night’s mistakes. No Philby male has ever made it past sixty-six. It’s time to ride the current.
Anyhow. You’ve waited months for the manuscript. I don’t have the manuscript, but I do have the start of chapter three:
In 1990, while moving from Brooklyn to Chelsea, I found Victor’s obituary in the front pocket of a long-forgotten pair of jeans. Victor died in January of ’86, the same year a distant cousin on my father’s side strangled his girlfriend with a fishing line and dumped her body in Sag Harbor Bay. According to my sister, we’d met this cousin at our grandfather’s funeral. I don’t remember him—even now his name escapes me, and I don’t care to look it up—but I also don’t remember my grandfather’s funeral. I spent the afternoon regurgitating the half bottle of gin that I’d stolen from his desk.
So Victor. Victor was the sort of queer who based every subsequent sexual encounter on his first: he grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, in a shabby bungalow decorated, as he described it, in the style of roadside motel; a married man—Mr. Collier—lived next door, with his pleasant-enough wife and two children, one with Down’s (the nice one, naturally), the other a bullying little girl who spent her summers torturing insects in the backyard; when he was eleven, Victor fellated Mr. Collier in a garbage-strewn copse behind the local convenience mart, and the accompanying sensations—terror, exhilaration, rage—shamed him into a marvelled silence. Their affair continued for a year, ending when Victor decided he wanted to see if girls had the same effect. He told me the deepest heartbreak of his life happened when he realized they did not.
Victor went blind one month before he died. He said he was glad he lost his sight because it allowed him to blame his father, in person, for everything bad that had ever happened to him. He blamed his father for throwing him out of the house when he was sixteen years old, for the bathroom arrests and drug overdoses and horrible boyfriends, the failed suicides, the thrice-broken nose, the scar from a broken bottle jabbed into his face during a bar fight in Duluth.
“My father just sat there and took it,” Victor said to me during our last phone call. “I unloaded on him. Both barrels, point blank—told him my death was his fault, said I hoped he never forgave himself. I told him about Mr. Collier, and if I’m being totally honest, a part of me hopes my father finds Mr. Collier wherever he is and brains him with a wrench. Death for one and prison for the other. A fair trade, don’t you think?”
I didn’t attend Victor’s funeral. I’d been to forty-six in the past year, all of them catered by the same lesbian couple. As stipulated in his will, I received Victor’s favorite pair of shoes, handmade Italian loafers that he’d bought during our disastrous Rome trip. This, I suspected, was his final joke—he wore a full size bigger than I, and he knew how much I hated clutter, but he also knew my weakness for the totemic.
Mid-June, 1986. Andy Warhol’s home in Montauk. A quiet weekday, the kitchen littered with pizza boxes and plastic cups that took on an uneasy significance because Andy used a new one every time, and a smear of his red lipstick always remained. I had stayed there for 36 hours, bored and drunk, sleeping on the couch, in my underwear, awakening to flashbulb pops as Andy took photo after photo, standing on the coffee table, on chairs, on a stepstool. Andy’s facelift looked ridiculous—Asiatic eyes, lumpy clay cheeks—and he often complained of stomach aches. The maid dusted in the corner. She didn’t throw anything out. Nobody could tell the difference between an installation and actual trash. Andy hated dust. He said the moon was an ideal atmosphere because the lack of particulate matter affected depth perception. A ridge one thousand feet away looked as sharp as the rocks near your feet.
Andy put down the camera and made scrambled eggs for breakfast. We ate on the patio, empty Campari bottle still on the table, a fly stuck to its lip. A white boat sailed in the distance. The breeze was warm and constant.
“Victor’s gone,” I said.
Andy turned to me, fork in mid-air. “Where did he go?”
“He’s dead.”
“So where did he go?”
“His body, you mean?”
“If that’s the best you can do.”
“Hell, I suppose. Victor wouldn’t have much patience for the other place.”
“Are you next?”
“I hope not.”
Andy chewed a piece of egg, pallid face tipped to the sun. “Somebody told me that science is working on a cure for death. Growing replacement organs in a lab. Customized, supposedly. They can build you a better heart, or a liver capable of handling however much alcohol you send its way.” He set his fork down, making sure the tines didn’t ring against the edge of his plate. “Of course the Japanese would be very upset—a well-abused liver is a beautiful thing in Japanese culture.”
“They buried him.”
“Who?”
“Victor.”
“Mmm.” Andy seemed displeased I’d brought him up again. “He is dead, after all.”
“Yes, but he’d asked to be cremated. I was supposed to scatter his ashes on Coney Island.”
“I have some ashes. An uncle, I think. You’re welcome to scatter them wherever you’d like.” He offered that classic Andy smile: comforting, jeering, inscrutable. “You know, it’s funny—I haven’t planned my death. I think I’ll just flit around, landing wherever, bothering whomever I want. Like a malarial mosquito. Or a Black Death flea.”
2.
This is how it ends, Tosh told himself. The old, hobbled wildebeest gets caught by the watering hole, a pride of lions—no, he thought, better yet a pack of jackals—stalking in the underbrush, a gibbering, drooling gang, insane with hunger, nipping each other, shaking their wire-brush manes, and then, and then. Would he feel it? A splash of hot blood, perhaps. His own piss soaking his legs. Why struggle, why raise his grizzled snout in protest? Better to just lie down by the water’s edge and let them rip into his belly, snuffling around for a mouthful of the good stuff. The herd wouldn’t miss him. Relieved, they would gallop away, across the savannah where tall grass sways in the wind. He imagined watching their rumps thundering off into the African dusk. Do not forget where I lay dying, he would bellow, a queen to the end, asking for tears shed in his name.
He checked his teeth in the upstairs bathroom mirror. A fleck of something dark wedged between right lower canine and incisor; the caterers used too much cilantro in the salsa and as he’d already complained to Katherine: Who serves salsa in late December? The joke was that he did. He’d broken another promise and thrown another Tosh Philby winter bacchanal, complete with the usual themed spread—this time a Mexican affair, featuring hand-rolled tamales, guacamole using avocados overnighted from Morelos, small-batch tequila courtesy of a boutique Highlands distiller—and a Mariachi band. Yes, Tosh had insisted. The band must wear traditional costumes.
But an hour earlier, as the guests plucked their mojito martinis from passing trays and the three musicians strapped on their sombreros, aristarch-at-large Teddy Benjamin sniffed at Tosh and remarked how unfortunate it was that those poor Mexicans (“Are you sure they’re even Mexican?” Katherine asked. “They look Guatemalan.”) should be forced into caricature. The Mexican people were a proud race, Teddy said, descendants of Aztec warriors and priests, inventors of the number zero.
“I thought Mayans invented the zero,” Tosh said.
“How can anyone invent the zero?” Katherine asked.
Teddy frowned. “I’m talking about privileged white men denying these people their ethnic pride. We’re all neo-colonialists, enjoying the benefits of—No, gracias, yo preferio pollo.” He waved off a server. “All the benefits of cheap labor without the associated guilt.”
“The labor wasn’t cheap,” Tosh said.
“And I do feel a little guilty,” Katherine said.
“My point remains. This will come back to haunt us, compensation being what it is.” Then Teddy floated away, eyebrow raised.
Katherine touched Tosh’s arm, put her sweet-smelling head to his shoulder, and squeezed. She reached up and stroked the plaid scarf tied around his neck.
“Don’t listen to him,” she said, and she too floated away. A strap from her dress had slipped down her arm. The more she drank the more it slipped—Tosh noticed scratch marks on her skin where she’d been pulling it back into place. The performance artist Clay Nixon balanced on one leg in the middle of the living room, the other tucked high and tight like a flamingo, attempting to play the opening bars of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on his harmonica. George Pace stood tethered to the wall, next to a young, gamine woman whispering something in his ear. George saw Tosh and winked. Sophia Haviland spilled her glass of wine and walked on. Tosh cleared his throat, raised his index finger in the air as though remembering some pressing matter, and fled to the upstairs bathroom.
Even now, flossing his teeth in the bathroom mirror, Tosh feared Teddy was right. As if the Village invited irony any more than his old place in Upper West. As if anyone noticed where they pulled down the old, hobbled wildebeest: his Brooklyn brownstone, his Manhattan penthouse, and now the top floor of a bohemian-chic condo down the street from the Cherry Lane Theatre. He’d moved three times in seven years, keeping the same furniture (wood, glass, and chrome, with spidery legs and masochistic cushioning), the same artwork, and even the same shower curtain—red like old bricks, with a silkscreen showing a parliament of rooks filling the canopy of an elm—re-gifted to him by Truman Capote, by way of some Hungarian prince.
He finished flossing, dry-swallowed a Valium, and dropped the pill bottle into his pocket. Twenty minutes sitting on the edge of the tub, eyes closed, then a splash of cold water on his face. He checked for nose hair, adjusted the collar of his sport coat, re-tied the scarf, flashed a cilantro-free smile, and glided back downstairs.
The art critic Ichiro Ohi now stood near George Pace. Ohi talked and George appeared to listen. Tosh wondered how long George could maintain the ruse, his dear George, his only artist, always more handsome than he remembered, sleepy-eyed and olive-toned, the product of a mother born in Dublin and a father born in Rome. In violation of his Irish roots, George erred on the side of laconic; a Mediterranean world-weariness infused his darkest moods, preventing any hint of the artist’s self-pity. When very drunk or very tired, his voice took on the faint, rolling lilt of childhood summers spent in Italy. He kept his hair clipped short like a collegiate wrestler and bought his clothing at thrift stores—not the trendy thrift stores but the real thrift stores, buried deep within Brooklyn, found near pawn shops and shuttered pizza joints. He rarely shaved. He showered infrequently. He seemed to exist on coffee, cigarettes, and chocolate bars.
Tosh slid across the floor as though trying to ice skate, then stumbled into George and attempted a twirl before settling for a sloppy hug.
“Cufflinks?” He grabbed George’s wrist. “Very nice. Who’s J.M.?”
“No idea,” George said. “I found them in a bin.”
Tosh thrust his hands into his pockets and tried to stand up straight. The Valium gave reality a gentle push, blurring the edges like a watercolor. “Too bad about the snow. It’s made everyone’s shoes squeak. Reminds me of those little frogs, the ones always going peep-peep-peep. Oh, what’re they called—”
“Peepers,” George said.
“Peepers.” Tosh slapped his own forehead and turned to George’s date. “I spent last summer in the Adirondacks, at the Sedgwick’s cabin. They have a Brazilian rosewood outhouse but no running water—can you imagine? I filled buckets with a pump. What is this fascination with the wilderness? The barbarians couldn’t wait to get into Rome. Of course the Romans couldn’t wait to get out, but they’d been sipping lead cocktails since the first century.” He turned back to George. “What do you think of my coat?”
George rubbed the lapel. “Very nice.”
“That’s velvet. Crushed. Accidentally. Ernesto bought it at a flea market in Milan.”
“Have you met Eve?” George said.
Tosh extended his hand. “Hello, Eve. You seem gorgeous.”
Her pale cheeks reddened. “Are you McGee?”
“I’m sorry?”
“McGee. The sculpturist.” Her hand wandered to her hair and began to twirl it around her finger. She had black eyes and a reed-thin neck. Her bracelets jangled softly. “Someone said you’re the guy who made that chicken sculpture over there.”
“That’s not a chicken and I’m not McGee. I’m Tosh Philby. This is my home and I bought that emu sculpture in 1998 from Arnold Darbenian. Short fellow, owns a gallery in Chelsea, inherited his money from his father, who was an arms supplier to the Armenian Liberation Front. And I believe the term is sculptor. George, back me up on this.”
George nodded. “It was the Armenian Liberation Front.”
“No, I meant about the term sculptor.” Tosh leaned closer to Eve. “Are you enjoying my party?”
She flashed a look at George. “Yes,” she said.
“You don’t sound convinced,” Tosh said.
“Artists intimidate me,” she said.
“Does George intimidate you?”
She paused. “A little.”
“How am I intimidating?” George said.
Eve twirled her hair again. “You do that thing, where you tip your head back and literally look down your nose.”
“I’m observing.”
“I know.” She pointed at George’s face. “You’re doing it again.”
Tosh grabbed a passing martini and took a swig, holding up his finger to forestall any interruption. “The trick to dealing with artists is making them talk about their art, which any artist will do because talking about art is infinitely easier than making art.”
“True,” George said.
“And once artists start talking about their art, you realize just how stupid many of them are. Du coup; intimidation gives way to absurdity. Excepting George, of course. He never talks about his art.” Tosh gazed over the room. “But you’re right—this party isn’t fun. The men should be bottomless and the women should be topless and the police should be pounding on my door for the sixth time. My guest list hasn’t changed in fifteen years. The names remain the same, the faces puff and plasticize. Speaking of, how old would you say I look?”
“Don’t answer,” George said.
“Sixty-three?” Eve said. “Maybe...sixty-two?”
George turned away. “Jesus Christ—”
“No, it’s okay. I’m in need of an honest opinion.” Tosh pressed his palms to his forehead and lifted. “Is it my eyes?”
Eve shrugged. “I mean, they’re a little hooded, but—”
“You must know a good surgeon. Whom do you use?”
“I’ve never had work done.”
“Everybody’s had work done. You can’t possibly be homegrown. Show me a picture of your mother.”
“I don’t have a picture of my mother.”
Tosh let his forehead drop. “They did something to your nose— a little bob, perhaps. And the bridge looks expertly shaved, like the Persian girls at NYU.”
“Eve models for Kristoff,” George added.
“Kristoff Kristoff?”
“He’s just Kristoff, now,” Eve said.
“C’est des connerie. Has Kristoff asked you to pose nude?”
Her cheeks reddened again. “Yes, but—”
“And he was nude, as well? And he developed an erection, and dealt with it accordingly?”
“Yes, but—”
“I heard his penis is small and arrow-shaped, akin to a Clovis point.”
George grabbed Tosh’s arm and pulled him away, across the room. They stopped in the foyer, next to the layers of hanging coats that Tosh thought resembled a line of bodies lying in a field, victims of an airline disaster.
“You’re being very rude,” George said.
Tosh leaned against the wall. “I’m toughening her up. How old is she?”
“Twenty-two.”
“And she knows your age? And she doesn’t find it gross?”
“Thirty-five is gross?”
“I can’t remember. It feels so long ago.” Tosh slid down to the floor. “Last night I dreamt that my life was an icicle, melting in the sun. Every drop was another year.”
“You’re still apologizing to her.”
Tosh stuck out his tongue.
“I saw Edward last week,” Tosh said, after a while.
George stared down at Tosh. Tosh stared back.
“Is he happy?” George asked.
“He’s furious.”
“Because he doesn’t know what he wants.”
“He wants a thirty-by-thirty portrait of a chessboard with three pawns.”
“I gave him my interpretation.”
“I don’t know what you gave him, but it terrified his nine-year-old. He said it looks like it wants to eat him.”
“I don’t paint for children.”
Tosh grabbed a fistful of fur coat and started to haul himself up. “What if I get you an extra fifteen percent?” A loud rip; he fell back to the floor, clutching a long strip of fur. He pulled the remainder of the coat from its hook and rolled it into a tight bundle. “I’ll tell Edward you’re happy to try again but you need new supplies because your dog ate your brushes. Or your unruly nephew ate your brushes. Or your dog ate your unruly nephew.”
“Get me an extra twenty and I’ll include all three pawns.”
“When can you have it finished?”
“Six weeks.”
“Aren’t you going to Rome?”
George frowned.
“It’s just that last time we discussed the possibility—”
George held up his hand, fingers outstretched. “I was drunk.”
“My friend Gaspare says you can use his apartment. He’ll take a painting, in trade.”
“I’m not going.”
“Fourth floor, twelve hundred square feet, southern exposure, and a patio overlooking Villa Borghese. Have you ever been?”
“Once, with my father, when I was seven. He fucked a waitress in a women’s bathroom and made me stand guard.”
“Perhaps you can set aside your childhood trauma. One night, not too long ago, I caught myself groaning as I eased into the couch, and saw I was wearing only one sock, and my neck was stiff, and I remembered how, earlier that day, I’d scowled at a group of teenagers running through traffic. Suddenly there it went: my froth, my effervescence, like a bottle of champagne whose cork has failed. Pffft.”
Tosh curled himself into a ball on the floor, bundled fur coat under his head, and closed his eyes. He listened to the murmur of conversation, the clink of glassware, the squeak of shoes, someone’s fake laughter. He imagined himself rising through the ceiling, leaving behind the noise and his beloved apartment, floating into the night sky, the city shrinking into a landing strip, then a neon archipelago, then nothing.
“Tosh. Tosh, wake up.”
He opened his eyes. George loomed overhead, surrounded by a dozen other faces. Sophia Haviland chewed her thumbnail. Eve clung to George’s arm, crying. Hector clutched a bottle of beer in both hands. Teddy Benjamin whispered into his phone. Ohi flitted around the perimeter, tut-tutting to himself, inscrutable gaze behind his oval wire-rims. Clay sat on the floor, Indian-style, eyes closed, breathing deeply.
“There she is.” Tosh smiled at Eve. “No need to cry, my dear. I was inexcusably rude—”
“She jumped,” George said. “She jumped off the balcony.”
Someone in the background wailed. Tosh drew himself up; his right leg had fallen asleep and he tried to flex it.
“Katherine.” George put his hand on Tosh’s shoulder. “She jumped.”
“Katherine?” Tosh said. “My Katherine?”
“She handed me her wine glass.” Eve’s voice hitched, and she looked around, fingers close to her mouth. “Then she said she had to leave, and she was sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk, and she just—I mean, she took a step and I didn’t know what—”
Tosh flattened his hands against the wall. “Where is she now?”
“Down there,” George said.
“Down where?”
“The street.”
“Is she hurt?”
Someone laughed, humorlessly.
Teddy Benjamin crept into view. “We called the police.”
Tosh stared, open-mouthed. Eve still clung to George. Ohi took off his glasses and polished the lenses with the hem of his sweater. Clay— now on his feet, harmonica still dangling—patted Tosh on the shoulder.
“We made the necessary calls,” Teddy said.
Collective nods. Clay blew a C on the harmonica. Tosh ran, or, rather, he flopped and lurched, hauling himself across the foyer, careening off the walls, ripping coats from their hooks. He rammed against the door, slid to his knees, and with what felt like an Herculean effort, yanked the door open and collapsed into the hallway. His right leg still wouldn’t move and he wondered if he’d had a stroke. It was how his father had gone—he remembered tapping his father on the shoulder as he lay in bed on a Sunday morning, one eye shut, a slash of white between the purplish lids of his other eye, tipped glass of sherry on his stomach, an equally purplish stain the shape of Florida spread across the coverlet.
Then he was stumbling down the stairs, George shouting somewhere above, joined by a chorus of frantic voices. George suddenly appeared in front of him. He told Tosh to stay calm, that he was in shock and—
Tosh shoved and George grabbed his arm. They tumbled; a moment of dizzying, zoetropic weightlessness before Tosh found himself lying in the foyer’s entrance, dark shapes amassing outside the front door, his cheek pressed to the cold tile. Far away, sirens wailed.
He plucked a cufflink off the floor and held it between forefinger and thumb. George sat up, rubbing the back of his head.
“Hello?” someone shouted from above. Tosh saw an uneven ring of faces framing the top floor railing: Sophia, Ohi, Eve, Clay.
Teddy Benjamin waved down to him. “Are you okay? Tosh? Jorge?”
“His name is George,” Tosh shouted back. He dropped the cufflink. “Is anybody getting the first aid kit?”
Over the thirteen years he’d been friends with Katherine Crane (starting in Key West, at a party on a yacht hosted by the producer of a then-popular medical-themed TV drama) Tosh had made himself a connoisseur of her face; an exquisite face, he’d always believed, modest and symmetrical, nothing overblown about her lips, keeping the aquiline nose she was born with, a high forehead with the blunt dart of a widow’s peak, a fine branching of wrinkles and laugh lines offering proof of two divorces, three (admitted) abortions, multiple younger lovers, and, in one drunken weekend, a quickie with Tosh. They’d finished a bottle of Dewar’s and two bags of Doritos while sharing a suite in Miami—Katherine was on a panel at Art Basel, Tosh tagged along because he had nothing better to do—and not out of lust or boredom but simply because they loved each other and had run out of ways to explore its boundaries, they slept together. They laughed all night, even during orgasm, as though watching a comedy in which two fine actors were portraying themselves. Tosh gave a bellboy a handjob later that weekend, behind a restaurant in the back of his rented Camry. Katherine bedded the concierge.
But now, as he stood on the sidewalk, hands pressed to his ears, plaid scarf dangling from one fist—he’d taken it off in preparation to make a tourniquet—he didn’t recognize the wet sack lying in the street. A throng of gawkers collected in a semicircle. They gasped and whispered because Katherine Crane had come undone. None of the glistening bits made any sense. Tosh located a trail of viscera, long and winding, starting at what he guessed was her torso and ending at the rear wheel of a taxi that had plowed into a telephone pole, its hood bisected and the windshield fractured white with a spot of dark where he suspected the driver’s head had struck. He made a clinical observation: Katherine had fallen into the path of the taxi, simultaneously exploded and dragged.
Someone retched. The sirens grew louder. Tosh felt nothing, not even as George pulled him away. He only wanted to watch the plaid scarf flutter and trail from his fist, a gift from Katherine, bought at a haberdashery in Boston. It’s distinguished and scratchy and a tad outdated, she’d told him during his birthday dinner three years ago. It reminds me of you.
3.
Tosh walked for hours through his beloved city: a fresh strip of black covered the spot where, for weeks, a water main once lay exposed down the middle of Morton Street; the green Saab on the corner of Barrow and West no longer displayed the For Sale sign in its rear window; the hydrant beneath the dying locust tree on 23rd and 10th was painted anew; the condo at 251 Amsterdam, a three-bedroom with vaulted ceilings that Tosh flirted with for months, finally sold and was now under construction, as Tosh knew it would be. The hedge funders and gay couples hunted properties like predatory wasps, injecting their larvae into the soft bellies of old brownstones until they burst, spilling forth toddlers and tiny dogs. Unlike the rest of the Old Guard, Tosh refused to complain; rather the fading king of a growing empire than a tyrant of the past, he believed. And he would be remembered as a king: he knew the name of every doorman and the passcode for every gated park. There wasn’t a mailbox he hadn’t leaned against, not an alleyway he hadn’t explored. The city hadn’t felt like a city in twenty years. It was his demesne, he was its benevolent ruler, content to just walk and walk at a pilgrim’s pace: tireless, placid, pious.
Tosh lit his fourth cigarette of the evening. Midnight, and the streets were quiet: taxis slid by, snow swirled. He strolled along the river, accompanied by the moon’s reflection. Couples walked past. Mourning doves cooed. He made it as far as the northern edge of Hell’s Kitchen, where he flicked away his cigarette and stopped at a tower of dressed stone and leaded windows. The doorman wore a wool coat and cap, his acne reddened by the cold. He nodded at Tosh.
“Serge have the night off?” Tosh said.
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“Serge. He used to work the night shift.”
The doorman shrugged.
Tosh forced a smile. “How’s it look tomorrow?”
“Sir?”
“The weather. Snow? Freezing rain?”
The doorman shrugged again. “Snow, if I had to guess.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a joint handy.”
“A joint?”
“Don’t make me sound square. A joint. A roach. A marijuana cigarette.”
The doorman coughed into his fist. “No, sir. Afraid not.”
“That is a shame.” He extended his hand. “I’m Tosh.”
The doorman squeezed, quickly. “Oliver.”
“Well, Oliver, Serge often had a spare joint tucked away somewhere, for emergencies.”
“Is this an emergency, sir?”
“I’ve had a bad night.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I wish I could help.”
“I’m wearing an Hermès Clipper watch. It can be yours, provided you find me a joint.”
“Sir, again, I’m sorry, but—”
“How old would you say I look?”
“Uh—”
“Venture a guess.”
“I’d rather not.”
“If you had to guess.”
“I’m not good at this sort of thing.”
“If I insisted you had to guess.”
Oliver sighed, thrusting his hands into his coat. “Fifty-two...ish?”
Tosh pulled a crisp hundred from his wallet and stuffed it into Oliver’s pocket. “Get your girlfriend something tasteful.”
The man behind the front desk called up as Tosh waited near a ficus tree. The lobby was quiet and small. Framed photos showed the neighborhood the way it had been in the early sixties: quaint storefronts, missile-shaped cars, women in thick heels, men in suits and hats.
He took the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor. The halls were clean with green nubby carpeting. Two polite knocks, a few seconds while Tosh combed his hand through his snow-dampened hair, and the door creaked open.
A young man wearing scrub pants answered. He was barefoot and shirtless, his torso smooth and muscled, his thick black hair sticking up on the side of his head in that manner particular to handsome boys for whom insouciance—Tosh knew this young man had plenty of that—is a congenital gift. They are always just-out-of-bed, squinting as though facing the sun for the first time, never quite impressed or surprised by anything.
“Did I wake you?”
The young man yawned. “I was just...” He gestured into his apartment; Tosh couldn’t decipher what that meant.
“I didn’t realize the time until halfway up the elevator,” Tosh said. “Sorry for ringing so late. I figured you still bartended weekends.”
The young man narrowed his eyes. “Is everything cool?”
“Yes, Alden. Everything is cool. What happened to Serge?”
“He retired six months ago. You sure everything is cool?”
“I was in the neighborhood. Figured I’d stop by for a drink.”
“At one a.m.?”
“Insomnia.”
“Still?”
“Since the third grade.”
Alden scratched his head. “As long as you’re okay with the mess.” He looked at his bare feet and wriggled his toes. “I’ve been feeling very hermit-like.”
Tosh brushed past and walked inside, pulling off his coat. “I’ll take any kind of brown liquor. Heavy on the ice, please.”
Alden Fletcher’s apartment was labyrinthine. Small rooms led to small rooms, bookshelves held hundreds of faded tomes, desks were covered with pens, papers, file folders, and the occasional taxidermic bird. Tribal masks hung on the walls, next to paintings of fox hunts and sailing races. The rooms smelled of dust and old wood. Everything creaked. Oriental rugs lay atop warped floorboards, tapestries draped over couch backs. A single window, filmy and streaked, revealed itself, flanked by velvet curtains.
Tosh sunk into a threadbare couch as Alden shuffled to the corner and opened a cabinet. “We have Jack Daniel’s,” Alden said. “And a raspberry liquor, and some decent coke.”
“Yes, blech, and yes. Start with the powder and we’ll work our way down. Or would that be up?”
“It’s all you. I have a deadline tomorrow.”
Tosh rubbed his palms against his pants. “The last time I did coke, Sophia and I tangoed across Teddy’s living room and knocked over one of his end tables.” Alden brought over two bottles and a small baggie; he knelt, scooched closer to the coffee table, and began to empty the white contents onto a book of crossword puzzles. “I cut my foot to the bone,” Tosh continued. “Here—” He unlaced his shoes and peeled off a wet sock. “You can see the scar, right under my big toe.”
Alden squinted. “Looks like a wrinkle.”
“It’s not a wrinkle. I have beautiful feet. I keep them covered at all times, except for that night. And see what happened. Oh, those are very even lines, Mr. Fletcher. Do you have a straw, or would you mind if I rolled a bill?”
“Whatever works.” Alden sucked the powder off his finger and sprung to his feet. “Heavy on the ice, you said?”
“My savior.”
He walked to the kitchen as Tosh plucked a fifty from his wallet. “I threw a party tonight,” Tosh shouted. He could hear Alden moving around in the kitchen. “Mexican themed. We had a mariachi band.”
Alden shouted back: “Did they wear sombreros?”
“I insisted.”
“Bet that was awkward.”
He bent over, snorted, and straightened up. “Someone accused me of being neo-colonial.” He took another snort. “Are you okay?”
Alden’s head peeked around the corner. “I’m chipping ice off the freezer.”
Tosh’s cell buzzed. He glanced down at a text from George.
Where r u?
Drinking, Tosh typed. You with Eve?
Yes. We need 2 come get u. Police have ?’s
Alden peeked out from the kitchen again, holding a stack of ice chips. He wrinkled his nose. “Smells like shrimp.”
“I’ll take it neat.” Tosh poured himself three fingers and gulped it dry. He loosened his scarf, sank back, and closed his eyes. His hand went to the pill bottle in his pocket. The kitchen faucet ran; Alden whistled. Tosh wondered how temporary this good feeling was—he’d had some excellent times in this apartment (browsing the shelves of Alden’s deceased grandfather’s library, sifting through some pricey old books, stroking the feathers of various stuffed birds while stoned on very good weed), but it ended the way all his relationships did: lazily, with no preamble and a long, confusing epilogue. He was friends with all his exes. Katherine insisted this was because he’d never been in love.
“My best friend killed herself tonight,” Tosh said.
A pause from the kitchen. “What’s that?”
“Lasagna,” Tosh said, refilling his glass. “I would’ve killed for some lasagna, tonight.”
The kitchen faucet continued running. After a few minutes Tosh turned on the TV. The softly lit tones of PBS came into focus, and he watched as a pimply twenty-something with a struggling goatee and a Midwestern accent talked into a microphone.
“McGee,” the kid intoned, pausing for effect. “Like many cultural luminaries, he needs only one name.”
Tosh laughed as the camera cut to a tall, angular man dressed in a red turtleneck and skinny jeans, working in his studio, surrounded by monstrous, half-formed sculptures of chickens in various poses: dancing, sitting at a desk, perched atop a high dive platform.
Another cut, this time to McGee seated at a Kubrickian-white desk in front of a Japanese-papered window, wearing small black eyeglasses, a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger. The kid sat on the other side of the desk, looking like a student called to the principal’s office.
Kid: Were you surprised the MoMA bought your chicken series?
McGee: Was Napoleon surprised when Alexander the First surrendered, or was Napoleon so aware of his powers that it all seemed predestined?
Kid: [shrugs]
Tosh: [groans]
McGee: I knew, even as a child, where my talents would lead. I also knew the dangers of success, and how it can blur one’s focus.
Kid: Has success blurred your focus?
McGee: My focus will always remain sharp because it resides at the molecular level, at that unseen juncture where the artist’s work collides with the absence of the artist’s work. I’m talking about quantum entanglement, my electrons wrapped up in the electrons of all the great sculptors before me—
Tosh: Sculptor! I knew it.
McGee: Bernini, Rodin, Brancusi, Michelangelo. My art is a continuation of their work, and the work of their masters, and all the way back until we arrive at Eden. Do you understand?
Kid: I think so.
McGee: Then tell me.
Kid: [laughter]
McGee: Are you laughing because you’re nervous, or because you don’t understand?
Kid: I don’t know.
McGee: I’m saying my “chickens” aren’t “chickens” in the chicken-qua-chicken sense. Rather, they are objects that create a chicken-shaped deficit—
He hit the mute button. McGee’s mouth continued moving. The kitchen faucet still ran.
Tosh knew why. Alden was shooting up, and he always shot up alone. He’d broken his rehab promise. PBS was a clue. The bland news shows, the pledge-drive dorks with their ill-fitting shirts, those unfathomable Anglophilic programs featuring tweed-clad inspectors always kicking around stables—PBS was tonally similar to heroin, the perfect companion for lost afternoons.
The faucet stopped. Alden walked back into the living room, eyes hooded. A wire-thin trickle of blood leaked from the crook of his elbow.
“Awesome.” Alden stood with his hands on his hips. “That’s great. Really great.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The lasagna. You said you had some killer lasagna. Man, I’m starving.” He rubbed the back of his neck, eyes fluttering shut before snapping open. “Are you still in Brooklyn?”
“I’m in the Village now. I walked here. Remember?”
Alden grinned, slowly. “What happened to your old Bentley?”
“Storage.”
“I loved that car. I loved its smell. Especially on hot afternoons.” He peered past Tosh, to the windows. “Hey, it’s snowing.”
“It is. Rather beautiful. Fat, lazy flakes—”
“Just taking their time.”
“Indeed.”
The radiators ticked.
Alden gazed at the TV. “Is that the guy who was talking about quantum entanglement?”
“McGee. He’s a sculptor.”
“He should stick to sculpting.”
“If that.”
Alden rubbed the crook of his elbow, smearing the blood. He seemed not to notice. “Wanna fuck?”
“No, Mr. Fletcher.” Tosh let his hands fall to his lap. “I’ve already been through one tragedy tonight.”
4.
Masterpiece Theater ended and the pledge drive resumed. Tosh put Alden to bed, tucking the blankets tight under his chin as Alden mumbled and laughed to himself. Then he cleaned the kitchen—scrubbing pans, wiping down the stove, sweeping up bits of food and coils of hair—and set the freezer to defrost. After a brief discussion with Oliver, he once again walked out into the cold night. He followed the park farther uptown, puffing the barely-there joint gifted by Oliver (a gesture that nearly brought him to tears), walking until his toes numbed and he could no longer feel his face. Passing cabs nauseated him; he considered stealing an unchained bike left leaning against a light pole, then realized it had no front tire.
He stopped at West 77th, at a brownstone with missing iron rails. An older man stood in the threshold, dressed in boxer shorts, a wrinkled dress shirt, and dark socks pulled high over his calves. He smoked a cigarette. When he saw Tosh he smiled, though not as widely as Tosh hoped.
“Kitty insists it’s been ten years,” the older man said. “I told her we ran into you at that Cindy Sherman exhibit, back in ’03. She didn’t know what I was talking about. I said: ‘Cindy Sherman, the photographer.’ She said: ‘I know who Cindy Sherman is, you idiot. I just don’t remember seeing Tosh.’”
Tosh climbed the steps. “I wasn’t there.”
“You asked everyone for donations to your Kill Tom Otterness fund. Said you had a hitman, outside, waiting for the cash.”
“Did I succeed?”
“I gave five hundred bucks.”
“Very generous.”
“I’m a dog lover.” The older man tossed his cigarette. “Thank goodness you called, because Kitty bought too much meat.”
His name was Irving Zotto, and his home, occupying the entire upper floor, reminded Tosh of his first New York apartment: the rickety wicker chairs, the toothpaste-white walls dotted with spackle, the thick shag carpeting, the tan-bricked fireplace caked with soot, the Sputnik-styled chandeliers. Irving had been an off-off-Broadway producer during the blessedly brief year that Tosh invested in several of his musicals—including the disastrous Whalers! starring Paul Lynde as a blackface Queequeg—yet Irving somehow managed to stay in the business, proving to Tosh that success hates a vacuum and certain fixtures remain so because failure makes for awkward parties; how else to explain his own immortality?
Kitty Miller, an attractive older woman with an obvious eye-lift, lounged on a white leather couch and introduced Tosh to her daughter Sandra, a blond, slim girl of about eighteen, sitting on the living room rug, toenail brush in hand, knees folded to chest. Irving stood at the bar and uncapped a bottle of vodka.
Kitty licked a bead of water off the side of her glass. “Am I the only one who thinks it’s too hot in here? I swear I’m fermenting. Like grapes in the sun.”
“Like grapes in the sun,” Sandra parroted.
“Make fun all you want,” Kitty said, “but I can’t keep my eyes open.”
“Because it’s one in the morning,” Irving said.
“No, because I’m jet-lagged, and every time you add another log to the fire, my eyes close another quarter inch.”
“Add another log,” Sandra said.
Irving sliced a lime in half. “How can you be jet-lagged? We haven’t been anywhere in over a month.”
“I have permanent jet lag. That must be a thing. Tosh? Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Mother?” Sandra said.
“Yes?”
“You’re embarrassing yourself.”
Kitty lowered her glass. “Says the girl painting her toenails cupcake-frosting pink.”
“I know it’s a silly color,” Sandra said, “but I like the way it looks against my tan. See?” She wiggled her toes at Tosh. “Do you approve?”
“Very flattering.”
“You are staying for dinner, yes?” Kitty said.
“Of course,” Tosh said.
“Then take off your coat and relax. You’ve been holding on to that scarf since you arrived.” She bared her teeth. “Irving, I adore you but this drink is too acidic.” She raised an eyebrow at Tosh. “Irving is trying to use up all the limes. Karl Heinrich—do you remember him?—sent us a citrus gift basket. Who sends citrus in January?”
“Germans,” Irving said. “They have no respect for the natural order.”
“When are we going to eat?” Sandra said.
“I hope you’re not a vegetarian,” Kitty said to Tosh. “We’re having steak. Big, juicy beefs packed with iron. Normally I don’t indulge in red meat but my endocrinologist says it might help with menopause.”
Sandra snorted. “That was ten years ago.”
Kitty reached down and stroked her daughter’s hair. “This is so nice, isn’t it? It’s been too long, suspiciously so, though I did bump into Malcolm and he did say you’ve been impossible to reach. Is that true? Are you in hiding?”
“I’ve been sleeping a lot,” Tosh said. He leaned against the bar, trying to conceal his fatigue, drink in hand, forcing that old Philby grin.
Kitty frowned. “You seem depressed.”
“I lost my Quaaludes supplier.”
“Mmm.” Kitty closed her eyes and leaned back. “I miss Quaaludes. Nothing goes better with red wine.”
Drink still in hand, Tosh soon found himself in the bathroom, staring at his reflection. He sat on the bathtub’s edge and dialed George. No answer. He dialed Katherine and tried leaving a message but his attempt at profundity vanished the moment her voicemail answered. What could he say that wouldn’t sound like the closing scene of some Mitch Albom tear-jerker?
A picture hung above the toilet: two children sharing a bath, the boy saying to the girl: No, you can’t touch mine, you broke yours off! A dark stain shouted at him from the bottom corner of a hand towel. A scarf of dust hugged the base of the sink pedestal. He wrapped his hand in toilet paper and swept away the dust, then turned the hand towel so the stain faced the wall. The medicine cabinet offered some consolation: Xanax, Oxycontin, Tylenol 3’s, Lucidol. He grabbed a handful.
They were waiting for him in the dining room when he returned. The steaks—steaming, bloody, sagging under their own weight—sat in a pile in the center of the table. Tosh sat near Kitty and she touched his shoulder; her skin was warm, her grip, motherly.
They ate. Irving and Kitty talked about their spring travel plans and Sandra asked Tosh where he thought she should go to college—California, Chicago, or New York? (Kitty immediately turned to him and mouthed New York.) She’d been accepted into all the requisite schools and had no preference for any of them. As she saw it, California offered perfect weather, Chicago offered muscular ambition, and New York offered—well, she wasn’t certain what New York offered, but it had something that everybody seemed to want.
The evening deepened. They talked about horse breeding, Persian rug collecting, and their most disappointing destinations (Khartoum, Xigaze, San Diego). Kitty said she was taking botany classes with an NYU professor; Irving announced he had a crush on his pottery instructor. The steaks disappeared. A chocolate cake followed. Chocolate smeared their faces, their hands, their teeth.
“So. Tosh.” Kitty wiped her mouth. “So, so, so.”
Irving steepled his hands and mimicked a solemn bow. “Ahh so.”
Kitty raised her voice over Irving’s laughter. “My little sparrows tell me you’ve taken on someone named George Pace. They say he’s remarkably talented, and handsome enough for luxury car ads. They also say his work is near-impossible to find.”
“He’s fickle.”
“They’re all fickle. Fickle as a spoiled cat. Nasty as one, too, always begging for a belly scratch, then—” She bared her teeth. “Hiss!” She switched to a playful frown. “I heard George has a piece hanging in a Midtown Starbucks. I suspect a Tosh Philby myth-making scheme.”
“It was George’s idea. He got free coffee for a year.”
“I’m disappointed. So when’s the show?”
“There isn’t a show. As I said: he’s fickle.”
“I’ve always wanted to paint,” Irving said.
“I’ve seen your paintings,” Kitty said. “Those fruit bowls or whatever they were.”
“Those were exercises.”
“But they involved paint, yes? And you were the painter.” Kitty looked to Tosh. “Irving was the painter.”
Sandra pulled away her mother’s wine glass.
“Of course Irving wants to be treated like an artist,” Kitty continued. “Despite never having achieved anything remotely artistic.”
“Calabria,” Irving said.
Kitty frowned. “Last year?”
“You didn’t go to Italy last year,” Sandra said.
“The Mancuso wedding,” Irving said.
“Oh, God.” Kitty covered her mouth in mock horror. “You mean the placeholders?”
“I hand-painted every one of them,” Irving said, proudly. “Watercolor landscapes. Does George Pace work with watercolors?”
“Oils,” Tosh said.
Kitty placed her hand on Tosh’s wrist. “Nobody knew they were land scapes.”
Irving placed his hand on Kitty’s wrist. “Patrice said they were beautiful.”
“As I recall, Patrice spent the entire reception blathering about some giant beetle she’d found in her luggage. Do you have any of the placeholders here? Bring one out for Tosh.”
“I’d rather not,” Irving said.
“I’m with Irving,” Tosh said. “The lighting isn’t appropriate for the subtleties of watercolor.”
Kitty looked away, chin resting in palm. “I sense a conspiracy. But maybe you’re right—one wouldn’t view the Mona Lisa in a gas station bathroom.”
“Mother.”
“Yes?”
“Stop.”
“Your mother isn’t doing anything wrong,” Irving said.
“Thank you, Irving. My daughter never misses an opportunity to play the advocate, provided it’s me she’s advocating against. And don’t think I didn’t notice you stealing my wine. Is anyone interested in a cordial? I want to hear more about fickle George.”
Tosh excused himself after the third glass of cognac. Kitty had passed out on the couch, Sandra at her feet, painting her mother’s toenails cupcake-frosting pink. Irving fetched several of his placeholders and explained the composition—I chose three spruces to signify the marrying couple and their future child—until Tosh could take it no longer. He remembered sweeping the placeholders off the table, then stumbling down the hall into the welcoming confines of the elevator, warm and small and gleaming. He soon found himself lying on the elevator floor, the carpet rough against his cheek, the lobby bright and cold, with the night watchman scowling at him.
Tosh trudged through the collecting snow, to the West 79th Street station, where he took the D Train to Coney Island. He sat in an empty row, gazing past his reflection at the blinking lights and hullabaloo of his dear city. He felt perfectly drunk. A young mother stood near him, gently rocking a stroller. Tosh unstrapped his watch and leaned across the aisle. At first she ignored his entreaty, turning her stroller away. Then she said, I’m not interested, and then she tweezered the watch from his outstretched hand. She dangled the watch, still pinched between forefinger and thumb. Her expression softened. She asked, Is this real? and Tosh nodded. Did you steal this? she said, and Tosh answered, Do I look like I stole that?
By the time he got off the train, it had stopped snowing. He walked along the dawn-stained beach, hands thrust deep into his pockets, collar up, scarf aflutter. Occasionally, a cup skittered across the frozen sand. Holes pocked the shore, like sockets where giant molars had once been. An orange bucket with matching shovel, a broken-spine umbrella, a coverless book, a lighter, a rotted, gaping fish: he navigated past them all.
At the end of the closest pier he pulled the pill bottle from his inner coat pocket. Ahead lay the same ocean he remembered staring at as a kid, pining for some ship to drop anchor at the foot of their bluff; it was always a swarthy ship hand with broad shoulders who’d swing through his bedroom window and scoop him up, and make of him a brave pirate, tying sails to masts in the middle of storms and battling sea monsters, until one day, amid cries of triumph after he’d slain yet another beast from the briny depths, he’d gaze down, to the swarthy ship hand with broad shoulders, and see for the first time in his life what he imagined love looked like.
Tosh took off his shoes. Sitting on the pier’s edge, he dipped his feet into the black water, teeth clenched against the icy bite, and emptied the pill bottle. A puff of gray disappeared into the wind. It may have been the last of Andy Warhol’s uncle, or a burned lock of Victor’s hair, or a pinch of ash taken from Irving’s fireplace; or it may have been nothing at all.