The Best of Youth

by Michael Dahlie

  “I’ve given it to my editor and we’ll see how she reacts,” Kipling said. “She’s a genius and she can work magic from anything. But from my own first impressions, I’m not sure you understand what I’m trying to get at. I mean, all the disease stuff. The strokes Merrill was talking about. I want this story to be inspiring, but it’s so dismal. This should be about the union of the young and the old, how children and adults need to communicate, to commune. It’s just so bleak. Your book seems to be about suffering.”

  “But that’s not what it’s about at all,” Henry quickly said, “and that’s definitely not how it ends up.” Henry was tentative, though, not quite sure of the tone he ought to be taking.

  “Well, to be honest, Henry,” Kipling continued, “I’m only just a little of the way into it. But you see, that’s the thing. A book needs to pull you through. It’s got to be like a freight train. It has to start strong and have so much momentum that a reader simply can’t put it down. This is something I believe very deeply, and I haven’t seen that in this draft.”

  At this point, Henry was no longer struggling to understand his feelings. He was indeed offended. Kipling, however, not lacking in psychological perception, added, “I mean, you’ve given us a lot to work with. I’m hoping you’ll stick around for a second draft, but we need this to be good, and good writing comes through careful work. It’s not easy. It’s hard. Really fucking hard. If you understand that, how hard it is being a real artist, then we can get there.”

  Oddly, Henry actually felt just a bit of relief with this last statement, since he was now completely convinced that Kipling was a total moron. It was true that Kipling was technically his boss, and if he wanted to continue with the job he’d have to listen to him on some level. But he could also walk away. He didn’t need the money, and the contract was not the sort of document that bound him into permanent labor.

  Fortunately, Henry was spared from any more rapid calculations on this matter, since the conversation suddenly shifted when, after finally getting to his main course, Kipling began to grow very upset that his steak had been overcooked. He took a bite and said, “This is fucking garbage,” in a kind of whisper that was breathy and tight but still loud enough for others to hear. The waiter heard it, at least, and immediately came to the table to ask if there was anything wrong.

  At first it looked as though Kipling were going to wave him off, and it even seemed that he was trying to restrain himself. But after a brief pause he said (again, in the same kind of whisper), “This steak is fucking disgusting. It’s cooked to a crisp.”

  “I’m so sorry, but you asked for well done, sir,” the waiter replied. It didn’t seem like he was trying to pick a fight, but his response also wasn’t hesitant, perhaps because it was a legitimate defense: Henry clearly remembered Kipling saying, “I’d like it very well done.”

  Kipling again looked as though he were restraining himself as he considered the waiter’s answer. He didn’t lose his temper, if losing one’s temper means losing control. But Kipling was clearly very angry—angry in the kind of fastidious, high-achieving way that might be expected (if not forgiven) from an accomplished actor—and he certainly expressed himself efficiently along these lines. “Well, I didn’t mean for you to burn the fuck out of it, you little fucking cunt,” he said. “Take this fucking thing back and bring me another one.”

  The waiter quickly took the plate and turned without expression, but the “How about you go fuck yourself” the waiter delivered sotto voce was more than audible to everyone at Henry’s table. Kipling stared at his hands for a moment with startling intensity, his mouth tight and his eyes focused. He then unexpectedly smiled, looked over at Henry, and said, “So, I hope you’re coming out with us tonight, Henry. After dinner.”

  The request was delivered with a surprising amount of warmth, so different from what Henry had seen just a second ago. And it seemed sincere. It didn’t appear that Kipling was trying to compensate for his earlier anger. But at this point Henry concluded that he absolutely could not go to a nightclub with Kipling and quickly said, “I actually can’t go out with you. I have a friend who plays in a band. She plays viola. And they’ve got a big event tonight at a pretty important venue. In Williamsburg. I have to attend.”

  “What venue?” Kipling said.

  “A bar called Abeline,” Henry replied. “I could miss it normally, but it’s pretty much the best place to play these days. And to get a Thursday booking, it’s a big deal. I’d really love to go out with you. Clubbing. But I can’t. It’s actually my cousin who’s in the band. But not really. She’s a forth cousin, which isn’t even a relation by most definitions.”

  Kipling looked at Henry for a moment and Henry couldn’t grasp what was coming next—more complaining about his steak, a tearful hug, declarations of artistic inspiration? Kipling’s look was just so strange. Finally he said, “Well, that’s where Merrill and I are going too, then!”

  “But it’s all the way in Williamsburg,” Henry immediately said. “It’s way too far for you both.”

  “I’ve got a car waiting. A Maybach, no less. We’ll go out, see the show, and then we’ll all come back for whatever highjinks are going on in Manhattan.”

  Henry again began to scramble for a way out, but the best he could come up with was to mention that he was on the list and that it might be hard to get two other guests into the show with him. He wisely refrained from making this argument, however. Given bouncers’ familiarity with even the most minor celebrities, there was no conceivable way that Kipling would be turned away at the entrance, especially if they arrived in a high-end limousine. “Okay,” Henry finally said. “But I might not make it back to Manhattan. I’m feeling a little tired already.”

  “Ah, well, I’ve got something to help with that,” Kipling said, grinning and standing up from the table. “Interested?”

  Henry and Merrill shook their heads, although it took Henry a second to figure out what he was talking about. Kipling smiled and added, “You’re not finding better than what I’ve got here, my friends. Not anywhere.”

  Again, Henry and Merrill politely refused.

  “All right,” Kipling said. “I’ll be back.” And then he walked off to the bathroom.

  At any rate, by the time Kipling returned, his newly cooked steak had arrived, although he barely touched it, and the rest of the dinner was spent talking about an odd kind of project Merrill was working on with a retired athlete who had written a self-help book for single parents. Kipling asked animated questions, and seemed unduly fascinated by this particular father-athlete. But he did also seem somehow to be restraining something else, and just minutes after their plates were cleared by a busser, he became distracted as he saw their waiter walking toward a side door that led to the club’s guest rooms.

  “Okay,” Kipling quickly said, standing up. “Let’s meet out front in a few minutes. This is taken care of. They’ll bill me.” Kipling then abruptly walked toward the door through which the waiter had passed.

  Merrill too stood and excused himself from Henry. “I’ve got to make a call,” he said, not paying much attention to Kipling’s sudden departure. “Let’s meet on the street.”

  “All right,” Henry replied, a bit confused, but he himself had wanted to leave the table for the past several minutes—he’d gotten a surprising amount of his fish’s ginger sauce on his hands and wanted to wash up in the men’s room. And three minutes later, hands now freshly washed, he returned to the club’s dining room, still wondering if it was possible to elude Kipling and Merrill’s company for the rest of the night. This line of inquiry ceased, though, when he saw (as he passed back by their now-empty table) the waiter reenter the dining room, trying to smooth down his now strangely disheveled hair and looking entirely ashen—and ashen was a hard thing to pull off given the dim lighting. More relevant, the right side of his mouth was swelling and bleeding. The waiter put his hand to his mouth as he passed by the kitchen, then walked swiftly toward the men’s
room. Henry paused for a moment to watch all this, and then saw Kipling appear from behind the door. Kipling spotted Henry and smiled broadly. He walked up to him and said—they were now both close to the landing—“I think that our waiter will be far more polite the next time we come here for dinner.” Kipling then swung his arm around Henry’s neck and cheerfully guided the younger man down the steps.

  14

  THE MAYBACH’S INTERIOR was perhaps one of the strangest things Henry had ever seen, and while he had always regarded himself (rightly) as wealthy, New York was showing him once again that there was a world of rich people that he simply knew nothing about, particularly the world of the rich who had some claim to the sort of fame that Hollywood provides. The Maybach felt more like a private jet, with its single-person reclining seats, its buffed-beige leather armrests, and the burled oak panels and brushed steel trim. There were two seats facing forward (the reclining and individual variety) and then a sort of wraparound bench that, Henry imagined, could seat up to five slim socialites. And of course there was a discreet and cleverly disguised bar into which Kipling quickly began to rummage. Fortunately (for Henry’s own sense of dignity) Kipling did not pull out a bottle of champagne, but rather a bottle of vodka. He opened it, but then paused and said to Merrill and Henry, “We have beer too, if you’d prefer.” Henry and Merrill immediately indicated that they would prefer beer, and soon Henry was sipping a Guinness and finding that he was quite happy to have it.

  It was, of course, ridiculous to arrive anywhere in Williamsburg in a limousine, especially of this variety. Even the most uninitiated people of the borough knew enough to arrive at events on foot or on top of secondhand bikes. And Henry suspected that Kipling must have known this too. But he was clearly entirely comfortable with the facts of his financial and celebrity status and Henry was really in no position to try to convince Kipling that their arrival would make for something of an outlandish scene.

  What surprised Henry most, however, was how impressed everyone actually seemed to be once they arrived. Rather than haughty looks of disgust as the car pulled up to the entrance, where there was now quite a line, people were generally excited. Certainly no one threw a beer can at them, which Henry had half expected, and, once again, he thought that he really didn’t understand the subtleties of his social world at all. More than that, though, Henry couldn’t deny that he felt just a bit of pleasure in being part of the show. It was disgraceful, of course. And certainly he’d deny ever feeling such a thing if the matter came up with a peer. But he had to admit that he did, somehow, enjoy it all, and this after he’d grown even more repulsed by Kipling that evening. As they approached the bouncer at the break in the rope where people with special access went, Henry pointed to his name on the clipboard, indicated he had two friends, and they were soon mounting the stairs to the venue.

  Once they arrived, Kipling managed to pass easily through the crowd without any fuss. The people were so animated already, and the lights so dim, that Henry and Merrill and Kipling were soon able to find a table near the wall and sit down without too much trouble. That there was a table at all was surprising, but there was still a long line outside and the venue was not yet full.

  It took some time for the show to get started. They all ordered drinks and were on to their third when Abby’s band took the stage, and Odd Girl Out seemed as impressive as always—the viola and the bassoon and the flute seemed both comical and mystifying, especially mixed with Abby’s slight voice and her lyrics about being lost in strange cityscapes and dreaming about love.

  Abby seemed even more beautiful than usual. She was wearing a kind of sheer dress, and the way it hugged and lighted the shape of her breasts and her legs made it seem that she was wearing nothing at all. It was hard for Henry to believe (as always) that this was the same person who often bullied him into eating more vegetables, made fun of his introversion, and dragged him to parties full of twenty-somethings with whom Henry never quite got along. Onstage, Abby seemed to be a very different sort of person—different from the inhabitants of what Henry imagined was their social world, from any social world he could imagine, and certainly different from Henry himself.

  Throughout the concert, Henry had similar such reflections, working hard to suppress any sort of romantic longings, although it was hard to deny Abby’s appeal, as was perfectly obvious from the way the audience seemed so lost in the performance. And when the music finally ended, and the lights had been turned up, and Abby at last made her way to Henry’s table, it was clear from the glances around the room (although many people had already left) that her charm didn’t diminish any.

  Henry was quite proud to introduce her to Kipling, which he did after he and Merrill both hugged her warmly. “This is Jonathan Kipling,” Henry said, and then, remembering that he was expected to keep the true nature of his relationship with Kipling secret, added, “he’s friends with Merrill. He’s Merrill’s friend. We just found ourselves together tonight.”

  “It’s great to meet you,” she said.

  “And you too,” Kipling said. “I’m stunned. You were wonderful.” And then, “We’re heading back into Manhattan. The three of us. If you want to come. I’ve got a car waiting outside.”

  Henry wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that offer, but Abby quickly declined.

  “Thanks. Really,” she said. “But I’m so exhausted. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and shows kind of take it out of me.”

  “You were truly great,” Merrill said, smiling.

  “Yes, you really were,” Kipling added.

  “You were really great,” Henry said as well, not wanting to be forgotten.

  At any rate, in the next instant Abby was walking back to the dressing rooms, and Henry was once again alone with Kipling and Merrill. They all looked at each other for a moment, still taken with Abby, but at last Kipling said, “All right, then, men, back to Manhattan?”

  Here Henry thought that he could take his leave. He said he’d had a wonderful time but that he needed to get home, and despite some more prodding as they descended the steps and found their way to the street, Henry managed to keep up his resistance.

  “Really, I should go home,” Henry said. “I’m very tired.” And after reiterating this several more times, and even refusing a ride to his building—it was only about eight blocks away—Henry said farewell and was soon walking home alone.

  15

  IT HAD BEEN QUITE an evening and Henry was almost grateful for the hangover the next day, since it allowed him to focus on physical troubles and keep his mind off Kipling’s absurd ideas about “literature” and the difficulties that lay ahead of him in the world of criminal gun trafficking. Unfortunately, worries about this latter issue crept back as the hangover diminished, and over the next several days he did what he could to do research on possible outcomes of his case. He learned nothing that Lawrence hadn’t told him, other than some surprising information about a few extremely rare but shocking stories of unexpectedly long imprisonments concerning such things, although the truth was that two of these incidents happened in Turkey and the other concerned a man from Kentucky who had quite probably robbed several banks.

  At any rate, nearly a week after the night out with Kipling, the call finally came from the prosecutors in Massachusetts and, as Henry later understood from Lawrence, it was not good, but not terrible, and it was in line with what they had expected. “You plead guilty to one count of the illegal possession of a handgun,” Lawrence said, “one count of failure to register firearms, you pay a four-thousand-dollar fine, they recommend that you serve no jail time—you’ll get a sentence but it will be suspended—and you do a bunch of community service hours, which you can do in New York, on an exchange system that was set up a few years ago.”

  “So no jail time?” Henry said.

  “No jail time,” Lawrence said. “You’ve still got to go up and stand before a judge and plead guilty and all that, but the deal is done as far as the prosecutors are concerned.
If you agree, that is.”

  Henry paused. “And you think I should agree?”

  “I think you should agree,” Lawrence said. “I could shave a few hours off the community service and maybe get the fine reduced, but what’s the difference for you? I don’t think we need to piss these guys off.”

  “Yes,” Henry said. “I agree with that.”

  “The other thing,” Lawrence added, “is that they want to get this off their books. So how does next Wednesday sound for a trip north?”

  “Wednesday is fine,” Henry said. “I’d kind of like to take care of this soon as well.”

  It was a relief, Henry decided, to get this handled so quickly, although, as Henry assessed the fact that he’d avoided one great disaster that afternoon, he realized that there was something still quite troubling about what had been concluded. He’d now have a felony on his record, and not one that was easily overlooked—weapons charges, of all things. Of course, anyone who heard the story would understand his situation, but if he ever wanted to get a proper job or go to law school, he’d have to write (probably without much of an opportunity to explain) that he’d been convicted of gun crimes. That night, Henry started work on a story about an eighty-year-old woman sentenced to five months in prison for domestic abuse after beating her wheelchair-bound husband with her cane. The story started out as surprisingly funny, and certainly the husband got what he had coming (as details of the story suggested), but the story ended badly for the woman, the conviction leading to a traumatic divorce that left her penniless. At any rate, Henry felt it was a good story, and it was absorbing enough to take him through that troubling week before his court date.