by James Gregor
When he thought of the streets of Manhattan, he pictured stratified crowds of commuters surging between tall buildings, dressed in precise and disheveled overcoats, covertly racing each other to the subway with overstuffed briefcases. He saw himself on a different, less crowded street, walking straight-backed and trying to keep up as he did a series of double takes, while oblivious young men went past in sneakers and T-shirts. It was a vision at odds with the present cold, the scouring wind that sheared between buildings, and the salt that spread underfoot, eating up cars and shoes. Somewhere in Brooklyn Leslie and Courtney pushed around a stroller big enough to be an armored personnel carrier.
He was about halfway through his cappuccino when the street transformed into a stage, pedestrians receded into the mental shorthand of type, and cars turned into inert props. Blake was sitting in the window of the restaurant across the street.
He was with someone. Not someone: it was Patrick. Richard was immediately filled with shocked affection. Patrick, whom Richard had not spoken to for months, was trying to make Blake understand why he had gone out one night and never come back. Patrick, who understood him best of all, Patrick was on the verge of convincing Blake to understand him and to forgive him. Benevolence radiated out across the newly dramatic street. Despite the estrangement, in a gorgeous gesture Patrick had flown in from San Francisco to fix Richard’s life. Who had told him what had happened?
It wasn’t Patrick. It was a guy named Josh. Richard remembered the face: high, flat forehead, deep-set eyes, a histrionic, self-obsessed theater person. He was from Blake’s Tennessee Williams group, a few years older than Richard. Josh turned to look out the window. It wasn’t Josh. It was a Josh-like someone, with a higher, flatter forehead, larger, deeper-set eyes.
Richard stood up to get a better look. A waiter came to their table and Blake pulled out a credit card. Richard watched as Blake inserted it into a machine.
Richard had tried to convince himself that what he had with Anne was best: you chose someone who was an impenetrable mystery, but whose elusiveness did not tug at you; their distance gave you space to breathe and abide in a sphere of possibility, whereas the gravitational panic he felt for Blake was a precarious compound that would darken and decompose until it had burned away the surface of the earth and killed everything it touched.
Then, as Richard watched, Blake became something else entirely, and he felt a haunted sense of a life that continued on a track from which he had diverted, a track that he was not suited to follow, or likely was incapable of following, or from which he had simply fallen and then lost sight of. The self he had struggled to conjure his entire life, whole and capable, appeared like a hummingbird that paused in the air, displayed its brilliant throat, and retreated in a blur.
A group of people entered the café, their voices an indolent roar arriving from somewhere else. Richard walked to the door, the muffled convection of the coffee cup against his hand. He pictured himself crossing the street and tapping on the window of the opposite restaurant. Blake looked up and locked eyes with him through the glass.
Richard stepped outside. He imagined that Blake and the guy were newly obsessed with each other, that they worked on opposite sides of the park and traveled across town on their lunch breaks to see each other, enduring exasperating traffic complications just for a few minutes in each other’s company: it was the acute, extraordinary dawn of the relationship. Every gram of matter was suffused with the expectation or aftermath of contact, flesh was the absolute element, and the thick materiality of everything that would eventually decay was the greatest blessing and not the worst joke.
The man reached out and gripped Blake’s hand, and Blake shook his head, laughing, as if he were being asked to tango in some ridiculous setting. They stood up, and Richard saw that they were dressed almost identically—in pea coats and monochromatic scarves, with briefcases. They gathered their belongings and walked outside. They stood talking in the soft, centrifugal drifts of snow.
In front of his dowdier establishment Richard stood perfectly still.
He almost said something; he almost raised his hand and crossed the street. He watched Blake and the young man step across the slush and the garbage, two appropriate candidates for a long life together. They went off down the street and disappeared around a corner.
When they were gone, Richard walked east to meet Anne.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks:
To my family, for their forbearing and steadfast support; to my friends, far and wide, for comfort and critique; to the wonderful team at Frances Goldin, who helped shepherd this book into the light of day, but especially to my agent, Caroline Eisenmann, who, in her infinite wisdom, saw the potential in an early manuscript and made all this happen; to the dedicated people at Simon & Schuster, who have handled this book with such care, but especially my editor, Zack Knoll, of whom too many kind and admiring words cannot be said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© ALAN REID
JAMES GREGOR holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. He has been a writer in residence at the Villa Lena Foundation in Tuscany and a bookseller at Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. James was born and grew up in Canada. Going Dutch is his first novel.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by James Gregor
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gregor, James, author.
Title: Going Dutch : a novel / by James Gregor.
Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018044382 (print) | LCCN 2018058927 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982103217 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982103194 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982103200 (trade pbk.)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Love stories.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.G738 (ebook) | LCC PR9199.4.G738 G65 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044382
ISBN 978-1-9821-0319-4
ISBN 978-1-9821-0321-7 (ebook)