-Where would he be?
-I don't know. I just figured that when he quit, he'd left town.
-No. He stuck around. He got a job working on the Hell's Kitchen docks for a while. After that, he drifted around the boroughs and we lost touch. Then last spring I ran into him on the street in Red Hook.
-Where was he living? I asked.
-I'm not sure. One of the flophouses by the Navy Yards, I suppose.
We were both silent for a moment.
-How was he? I asked.
-You know. A little scruffy. A little lean.
-No. I mean how was he?
-Oh, Hank said with a smile. You mean how was he on the inside.
Hank didn't need to consider.
-He was happy.
The snows of the Yukon . . . the seas of Polynesia . . . the footpaths of the Mohicans . . . These were the sorts of terrain that I had imagined Tinker wandering for the last two years. And all the time, he had been right here in New York City.
Why had I assumed that Tinker was so far afield? I'd like to say it was because the unsettled landscapes of London and Stevenson and Cooper had suited his romantic sensibility since he was a boy. But as soon as Hank said that Tinker was in New York, I knew that I had pictured him far afield because it was easier for me to accept his willingness to leave, if it was to travel alone in the wilds.
So it was with mixed feelings that I received this news. Picturing Tinker wandering among the crowds of Manhattan, poor in all but spirit, I felt regret and envy; but a touch of pride too; and a little bit of hope.
For wasn't it just a matter of time before we crossed each other's path? Despite all the hoopla, wasn't Manhattan just ten miles long and a mile or two wide?
So in the days that followed, I kept an eye out. I looked for his figure on the street corners and in the coffee shops. I imagined coming home and having him emerge once more from the doorway across the street.
But as the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, this sense of anticipation waned, and slowly, but surely, I stopped expecting to see him in a crowd. Swept along by the currents of my own ambitions and commitments, my daily life laid the groundwork for the grace of forgetting-until, that is, I finally ran into him, after all, in the Museum of Modern Art in 1966.
Val and I took a taxi back to our apartment on Fifth Avenue. The cook had left us a little dinner on the stove, so we warmed it and opened a Bordeaux and ate standing in the kitchen.
I suppose that for most, the image of a husband and wife eating reheated food at their counter at nine o'clock would lack a certain romance; but for Valentine and me, who dined out formally so often, eating alone on our feet in our own kitchen was the highlight of the week.
As Val rinsed the plates, I walked down the hallway toward our bedroom. Along the wall were photographs hung from floor to ceiling. Normally, I ignored them as I passed, but on this night I found myself considering them one by one.
Unlike the photographs on Wallace's walls, these were not from four generations. They were all from the last twenty years. The earliest was of Val and me at a black-tie affair in 1947 looking a little awkward. A mutual acquaintance had just tried to introduce us, but Val had cut him short, explaining that we had already met-on Long Island in 1938-when he had given me a ride into the city to the tune of "Autumn in New York."
Among the photographs of friends, and of vacations in Paris and Venice and London, were a few with a professional bent: There was the cover of the February 1955 issue of Gotham-the first that I was to edit, and there was a picture of Val shaking the hand of a president. But my favorite was the picture of the two of us at our wedding with our arms around old Mr. Hollingsworth, his wife already gone and he soon to follow.
Having poured the last of the wine, Val found me in the hall surveying the photographs.
-Something tells me you're going to stay up a little longer, he said, handing me my glass. Do you want company?
-No. You go ahead. I won't be long.
With a wink and a smile, he tapped a picture taken on the beach in Southampton shortly after I had cut my hair an inch too short. Then he gave me a kiss and went into the bedroom. I went back to the living room and out onto the terrace. The air was cool and the lights of the city shimmered. The little planes no longer circled the Empire State Building, but it was still a view that practically conjugated hope: I have hoped; I am hoping; I will hope.
I lit a cigarette and then I threw the match over my shoulder for good luck thinking: Doesn't New York just turn you inside out.
It is a bit of a cliche to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time-by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still?
In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions-we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.
Maybe that sounds bleaker than I intended.
Life doesn't have to provide you any options at all. It can easily define your course from the outset and keep you in check through all manner of rough and subtle mechanics. To have even one year when you're presented with choices that can alter your circumstances, your character, your course-that's by the grace of God alone. And it shouldn't come without a price.
I love Val. I love my job and my New York. I have no doubt that they were the right choices for me. And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.
Back in December 1938, alone in that little room on Gansevoort Street, having already cast my lot with Mason Tate and the Upper East Side, I stood beside Tinker's empty suitcase and his cold coal stove and I read his promise to start every day by saying my name.
For a while, I guess I had done the same-I had started the days saying his. And just as he had imagined, it had helped me maintain some sense of direction, some sort of unerring course over seas tempest-tost.
But like so much else, that habit had been elbowed aside by life-becoming first intermittent, then rare, then lost to time.
Standing on my balcony overlooking Central Park almost thirty years later, I didn't punish myself for having let the practice lapse. I knew too well the nature of life's distractions and enticements-how the piecemeal progress of our hopes and ambitions commands our undivided attention, reshaping the ethereal into the tangible, and commitments into compromises.
No. I wasn't too hard on myself for all those years that had passed without my saying Tinker's name. But on the following morning, I woke with it on my lips. And so I have on so many mornings since.
APPENDIX.
The Young George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.
Finis.
Acknowledgments.
Foremost, I thank my wife and children along with my parents, siblings, and in-laws, for providing me with endless hours of joy and support. I thank Messrs. Arndt, Britton, Loening, and Seirer for being such extraordinary colleagues and friends over the last fifteen plus years. I thank my close companions and fellow readers Ann Brashares, Dave Gilbert & Hilary Reyl, as well as Sarah Burnes, Pete McCabe, and Jeremy Mindich, who all gave valuable feedback. Special thanks to Jennifer Walsh, Dorian Karchmar & the team at William Morris, Paul Slovak & the team at Viking, and Jocasta Hamilton at Sceptre who helped bring this work out into the world. And thanks to all the excellent purveyors of coffee from Canal Street to Union Square as well as to the Danny Meyer and Keith McNally organizations for providing such terrific stomping grounds.
Looking further back, I want to thank my grandmothers who had such poise and verve; Peter Matthiessen, whose early confidence made all the difference; Dick Baker, who remains my paragon of intellectual curiosity and discipline; Bob Dylan for creating several lifetimes' worth of inspiration; and Chance for landing me so unexpectedly in New York.