by Gwen Cooper
I would have considered moving to a different neighborhood, but within two months of September 11 I lost my job. My company had primarily serviced the large financial firms that had been decimated near Ground Zero, and was struggling for bare survival. Good luck finding an apartment in Manhattan without a letter from an employer—even if I’d had the lump sum necessary to pay first, last, and security (plus moving expenses) at a new building.
The entire economy had tilted into recession, and it took me eight months to find another job. I was as relentless in chasing down freelance work as I’d been a few years earlier, when I was first trying to gain a foothold in the marketing industry. When I did finally find a job, it was a permanent freelance position in the online marketing department of AOL Time Warner, one where I worked full-time fifty hours a week but received no benefits or guarantee of long-term employment. I went one terrifying year without health insurance. There were days when, as my grandmother used to put it, I lived on mustard sandwiches without the mustard. Somehow or other, though, I always paid the vet bills and rent.
Curiously, it was my parents who were the most supportive of my decision to remain in New York, alive though they were to the dangers that a life in Manhattan now seemed to present. They knew how important the move had been to me, how personally and professionally dead-ended I’d come to find my life in Miami. They were proud of the fact that, no matter how rough the going got, I didn’t creep back home with my tail between my legs.
If I had learned one thing from Homer over the years, it was that just because you couldn’t quite see your way out of a difficulty, that didn’t mean a way out didn’t exist. I’d also learned the value of persistence. The two of us—Homer and I—weren’t quitters. And as the months rolled by, I found another reason for refusing to leave New York if it was at all possible to remain.
New York was the city where Laurence Lerman lived.
I FIRST MET LAURENCE A MONTH BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11. HE WAS A close friend of Andrea’s fiancé, Steve—Steve’s “big brother” from college fraternity days and one of the groomsmen in their upcoming wedding.
That August before September 11 was probably the most comfortable I had felt in New York since I’d moved. Work was still good, I finally felt confident in my ability to navigate the streets of Manhattan on my own, and my cats seemed to have completely reconciled themselves to this major life change I had subjected us all to. Homer had formed a particularly strong attachment to the pizza deliveryman, who was at our door at least twice a month. Just that afternoon, he had presented Homer with a can of tuna when delivering my small pie with light cheese and extra sauce, which pretty much endeared him to Homer for life.
So I was in an expansive mood that night when I arrived at the party where I met Laurence—ready to add more people to my growing network of New York friends.
The occasion was the birthday party of a mutual friend, held on a tar-covered rooftop under the warm skies of Manhattan in summer. I remember perfectly the first time I saw Laurence. He was standing next to Steve, and the two of them were engaged in what appeared, from a distance, to be a lively discussion. Laurence wore a white buttondown shirt with the sleeves rolled up, blue jeans, a black belt, and black loafers. He gestured emphatically to Steve as he spoke, using his entire forearm, and leaned in intently. You might have thought the two of them were having an argument, except that Steve was laughing and the look on Laurence’s face was one of twinkly-eyed humor. “You remember who Laurence is,” Andrea said, and I dredged up some faint recollection of outrageously funny comments—or comments that Andrea had insisted were outrageously funny as she’d repeated them to me, laughing so hard she could barely breathe, before conceding that they probably lost something if Laurence wasn’t telling the story himself.
Several of Laurence’s close friends were there, two of whom were professional comedians and one of whom, within the next few years, would go on to become quite famous. There was certainly no shortage of humor, or funny stories, or hilarious insights that evening. I can remember word for word some of the jokes and stories that other people told, but I can’t remember a single word that Laurence said, not even whether he shook my hand when we were introduced or merely waved at me in a friendly fashion.
But I do remember thinking that Laurence was the funniest person there—probably the funniest person I had ever met. People came and went, small conversational circles formed and re-formed, but I didn’t move an inch from Laurence’s vicinity all night.
It wasn’t just that Laurence was funny, though; some of the funniest people you meet are performers by nature and, entertaining as they are, you get the feeling in talking to them that you’re simply an audience, that the things they’re saying to you are essentially the same things they’ve said to countless other people, and in that sense your presence makes very little difference to the flow of their thoughts. But Laurence liked to listen at least as much as he liked to talk. He would ask you questions and make you talk about yourself, and you would begin to think, in talking to him, that you were a more entertaining person than you’d ever suspected. Laurence liked to talk fast; he was quickwitted, and the speed at which his mind and mouth worked was a thing to be marveled at. Yet he never once talked over you, never cut you off in his haste to give voice to whatever was going on in his head. You would be the sole focus of his attention when he talked to you, yet suddenly you’d look around and realize that a small crowd had gathered to listen in on your conversation. You could never exactly say that Laurence had been the center of attention of any group he was a part of. But he was always the one who had made that group interesting.
And then there was Laurence’s voice, which was one of his great charms all on its own. It was a deep, rich voice with a booming resonance, as if his chest contained its own echo chamber. There was a raspy, smoky undertone to it, and when he was being funny it seemed to contain all the laughter in the world. It was a voice that could roar out at you like a lion, then suddenly drop to a murmuring intimacy that created instant in-jokes just between you and him. Much later, Laurence would tell me about the year in his twenties when he’d lived in Sweden, where he was a DJ for Stockholm’s first rock-and-roll station after the government deregulated radio. Everywhere he’d gone, even if it was just to a McDonald’s for an order of fries, people would excitedly say, “You are the Laurence from the radio!” It was a telling detail in Laurence’s personal history; his was a voice that, once heard, was never forgotten.
At one point, Andrea indicated Laurence’s girlfriend, who sat a few yards away on the bench of a chip-and-dip-laden picnic table that had been set up on the rooftop. It was a sultry night, and I wore one of those strappy tops that bare a great deal of cleavage. I remember thinking that if I had been Laurence’s girlfriend, and had observed him cracking up for hours with some cleavage-y, unattached girl nobody had ever seen before, I would have put a stop to it with a quickness.
I CAN HONESTLY say, however—at least so far as my own intentions went—that I was no threat to Laurence’s girlfriend that evening. Simply learning that he had a girlfriend, and that they had been together for over four years, would have tamped out any thoughts I had in that direction. I never was interested in unavailable men. I always found the quality of being interested in me one of the most interesting qualities a man could possess—and you can call that egotistical if you want, but it was a quirk that had painlessly extricated me from more than a few deadend relationships.
I was still fairly new in New York, and it would have felt almost incestuous to immediately begin dating one of my best friend’s fiancé’s best friends. Who knew how such a relationship would turn out, and Andrea and Steve’s wedding didn’t need to be about my relationship dramas. Surely, in a city of eight million, I could find other options. And then there was the question of age difference. Laurence was nearly nine years older than I was—which, in the general sense of things, hardly qualified as an age difference at all, but I didn’t need to consult books l
ike The Rules to realize that a man approaching forty who’d never been married might be someone who wasn’t too keen on the institution to begin with. The only thing I found less appealing in the abstract than a man who was unavailable was a man who, while technically available, would someday have to be talked into making a lifetime commitment.
I had never thought of myself as a person who was attracted to a set physical type. Looking back, though, I realize that most of the boyfriends I had—the ones I would have called serious—more or less conformed to a particular physical template. They tended to be tall and skinny, underfed looking, with dark hair and eyes, large noses, and ears that stuck out farther than they probably should. These men were literary or artistic—or, at least, frustrated artistic or literary types—and we would have long, intricate discussions about books and politics. They were shy and a bit awkward, and were always surprised that somebody as outgoing as I was was also as interested in books and politics as they were.
Laurence was barrel-chested, with short, stocky legs that looked so strong, it was as if they had been cast in iron. Wrestler’s legs, I would have called them. His eyes were blue, and sometimes, if he wore a shirt of a particular light blue shade, you’d swear that you’d never seen anything bluer. You couldn’t say if his features were large or small because they were so elastic. Look through my own photo albums and what you’ll see is a series of identical smiles aging as the years progress. I’ve seen hundreds of photos of Laurence, and I have yet to see any two in which he wears the exact same expression. I always, from the first time I met him, loved to look at his face, but for a long while the symmetry of it—the reduction of it to a simple collection of features—was too elusive for me to get a fix on. Laurence’s mind and his face together moved so rapidly, I had a sense that they presented a challenge I might not be up to.
It wasn’t as if I sat down and drew up this list of reasons why Laurence and I couldn’t be a couple. I’m just trying to explain why Laurence, despite the strong first impression he’d made, was immediately and almost irretrievably slotted into the category of Boys Who Are Friends But Not Boyfriends. My reasons for thus categorizing him were largely unconscious. As our friendship grew and people occasionally asked why we weren’t a couple—and they did—I always felt a vague surprise. It seemed so obvious that the two of us were destined to be the best of friends.
IT WAS A friendship that was initially slow to develop. I knew, the first night we met, that he was somebody I wanted to be close friends with—talk-every-day, see-each-other-constantly kind of friends. But that wasn’t something that happened right away.
For one thing, Laurence was the kind of person who’d retained just about every friend he’d made since nursery school; arguably he didn’t need another one. And then, of course, there was his girlfriend. Benign as my intentions may have been, I wasn’t naïve enough to think that a close and hasty friendship with a single woman he’d met five minutes ago, as it were, might not cause some friction. You don’t live with three cats without learning something about respect for territory. Laurence and I met from time to time at group dinners or special occasions—engaging in the kind of energetic, laughter-filled conversations that always left me with a lingering regret that I didn’t see more of him—but that was all. Andrea and Steve were married in May 2002, and as we posed for formal photographs Laurence told me I looked beautiful in my bridesmaid’s dress, and that was the last I saw of him all night.
A few weeks later, Laurence and his girlfriend broke up. I was giving Homer his monthly nail trimming (which was always an ordeal, Homer being fiercely resistant—far more than my other cats—when it came to anybody touching his claws) when Laurence called with the suggestion that the two of us go to some independent film he particularly wanted to see. Laurence was passionate on the subject of film—his knowledge was encyclopedic, but he wasn’t a guy who did nothing more than spit out dry statistics about who had directed or written or starred in every movie ever made. Laurence had a keen eye for camera angles, narrative arcs, character development. He could find beauty in something as minor as the specific pattern in which a director had chosen to shoot glass falling from a broken window. And he loved it all—even the silly stuff, the ridiculous comedies or shoot-’em-up action films that self-conscious intellectuals often eschewed. I loved that Laurence was “geeky” about something; I was geeky about things, too. And I liked that he knew so much about something that I knew very little about. I learned things from him.
Laurence was a writer and editor for a well-known film industry trade publication. Part of his job was interviewing actors and directors, many of whom were living legends who had shelves filled with every award under the sun. In listening to tape recordings of these interviews, you could tell how much they loved speaking with Laurence about film. You could hear it in their frequent laughter, or constant noting of, “Wow … that’s a good question. Nobody’s ever asked me that before.” Interviews that were scheduled to last fifteen minutes typically stretched to an hour and a half or longer.
I was overjoyed when Laurence called and asked me to see a movie with him, and I phoned Andrea to tell her of this development. It wasn’t until after the movie, when we were seated in a Moroccan restaurant in the East Village and Laurence asked about my family, that it occurred to me that perhaps he’d meant this to be a date? But he didn’t try to kiss me, or hold my hand, or make any other overtures toward physical intimacy, and I brushed the idea from my mind. I think I was able to do it so easily because I wanted to; I thought of Laurence as a potential friend, not as a potential boyfriend, and I was too eager to establish our friendship to allow it to disintegrate before it even began for that most banal of reasons—that we’d tried dating each other and found it didn’t work.
That it wouldn’t work was something I was so sure I knew, I didn’t even bother asking myself the question. Neither one of us was exactly a kid anymore, and how many successful relationships did we have between us? It was a risk I wasn’t willing to take—not with Laurence.
OUR FRIENDSHIP PROGRESSED over the next three years, and eventually came to be as close as I ever could have wished for. We talked on the phone several times a day, every day, and saw each other at least once a week—which, given how frenetic life in New York could be, was saying something. There was nobody, not even Andrea, whom I saw or spoke with as frequently as I did Laurence. When, early in 2003, I finally landed a permanent position in the marketing department of the company that published Rolling Stone and Us Weekly magazines, it was Laurence, and not Andrea, who got the first phone call.
Laurence was probably the first person to become important in my life without meeting Homer. This was not a conscious plan on my part and had more to do with the realities of life in New York. South Beach was a small town (consisting of only one square mile), and was the kind of place where friends dropped in on you at odd hours just to hang out. Manhattan was enormous, a town that encouraged efficiency and forethought plans. It was a city where you met people at the place you would be going to, rather than meeting first at somebody’s home and then proceeding out. People did occasionally come by my apartment just to kill time or watch a movie, but those were friends whose apartments were smaller and less comfortable than my own. Laurence—with all the luxury of a huge living space—had the most comfortable apartment by far of anyone I knew. On those occasions when we got together to relax on a couch over a pizza or a bottle of wine, it was always at his place.
Not that it was crucial for Laurence to meet Homer—it wasn’t as if I planned on marrying him or anything.
Besides, the two of us spent most of our time together out and about. Laurence had been born in Brooklyn, raised in New Jersey, and moved to Manhattan almost as soon as he’d graduated college. He was deeply in love with all things New York and, consequently, was the one I roped into all the touristy New York things I was dying to do. We went to Ellis Island, where I found the official record of my great-grandparents’ arrival in the
United States, and to the Statue of Liberty. We went to the top of the Empire State Building and to the West Village dive bars and subterranean restaurants where, a hundred years earlier, some of our favorite writers had caroused and drunk themselves to death. At the Museum of Modern Art, I was surprised to learn the depth of Laurence’s knowledge of modern art—far deeper than my own. Laurence was also a theater buff and procured tickets for everything from Henry V at Lincoln Center to Sock Puppet Showgirls downtown, which was—as its name would imply—a live-action take on the film Showgirls as acted by an all-sock-puppet cast. (Word to the wise: You haven’t experienced the true glory of live theater until you’ve seen sock puppets pole dance.)
By now, you’re probably saying, Okay … surely this paragon of male virtue had at least a few flaws. It couldn’t all have been this idyllic, could it?
Well, it is my sad and solemn duty to inform you that Laurence Lerman was a hoarder. He lived by himself in a rent-controlled, three-bedroom apartment that he’d occupied for nearly twenty years, and it was packed to the rafters with … junk. He had stacks of newspapers, magazines, comic books, and action figures. He had the Playbill for every play he’d seen since moving to New York, the ticket stub from every concert he’d attended since middle school, and a matchbook from every restaurant he’d dined in over the past two decades. Once, on a lark, I weighed his matchbook collection. It weighed over seventeen pounds. “That’s probably a fire hazard, you know,” I told him, and it was shortly thereafter that I began referring to him as Templeton, after the pack rat in Charlotte’s Web.