My friend P. and I agree to have lunch at a restaurant equidistant from our respective homes. A nasty rumor about P. has reached my ears. I’m not going to mention it to P., of course. That would be hurtful. But the rumor prompted me to instigate the lunch, out of a solidarity that cannot be revealed.
P. turns up in what looks like a safari suit.
Everyone’s deep into their forties these days and getting touchier by the minute. I must choose my words carefully. “Looking sharp,” I say.
“Pants, jacket, the whole thing—twelve bucks,” P. says.
A thrift store has recently opened in his neighborhood. Everything there fits him. He’s an XL and everything in the store is XL. “I realized something,” P. says. “Everyone dies when they’re XL. It’s the size of death. And now it’s my size.”
We laugh.
The food, when it comes, is excellent.
P. says, “I ran into your friend Simon Morgan.”
“I don’t know any Simon Morgan.”
“Well, he knows you. He sends his regards.”
“Mysterious,” I say, although it’s not really a mystery: Simon Morgan is almost certainly some kind of friendly acquaintance. The problem is my very poor memory, which is worsened by stress, which I have recently felt under a lot of. I’m dating again—dating, as in eating meals with and being interrogated by women I don’t know—and at the same time I’m going through a job-application process that involves a background check, which itself involves giving my fingerprints and listing every address I’ve ever had and, most strange and sinister of all, stating every name and alias I’ve ever used. I ask P., “What do these people think they’re going to find out?”
P. says, “Everybody’s got something to hide. Everybody.” He wears his usual gloomy face. With no lessening of the gloom, he says, “But you know what else is true? Everybody’s done something good that’s hidden—the opposite of a dark secret.”
“A light secret,” I suggest.
“Precisely,” P. says.
“Like an anonymous donation?”
P. shrugs. “It could be a lot more interesting than that.”
“Can you give me an example? One of yours?”
“You want me to tell you a light secret? I can’t do that. It’s a secret.”
I would laugh except that P. isn’t joking. I say, “I’d tell you one of mine, but I can’t think of any.” I’m not joking, either.
“Everybody’s got a light secret. Everybody.”
This is a wonderful thought, and I believe that it reveals P.’s benign essence. Having lunch with him is exactly the kind of thing I’ve decided to do more of. It is a matter of self-care in dark times. I want to socialize more intentionally and discriminately. I want to surround myself with only the wisest and most admirable friends, people whose kindness and good sense are not in question, people with a strong awareness of their lucky stars, witty people, people who like being alive. I know a good number of such people—fine souls. New York is a dirty, untranquil city, but it has a large population of fine souls. What is a fine soul? That is a nice question. It certainly doesn’t mean someone who has never entertained a black thought or someone who has never erred as P. is rumored to have erred.
We split the chocolate ice cream fifty-fifty, then decide to walk it off. But walk it off in which direction? I live uptown, P. lives downtown.
“Why don’t we head downtown,” I suggest.
With a little nod, P. agrees. We set off.
Tenth Avenue is hot, hot, hot, hot. With his epaulets and breast pockets and jacket belt, P. could be a colonial police inspector. Of course I don’t give voice to this thought. Nor do I say out loud that, with his ruminative air and portly gait, he gives the impression of someone chewing over the contents of a second stomach. Don’t make personal remarks, my father once cautioned me, and I have done my best to comply with that instruction. When (last year) P. told me that he was suffering from “burnout,” it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him, without malice I hope, if “burnout” was a new, maybe more dignified way of saying “nervous breakdown.” But I remembered my father, and I confined myself to repeating after him, Burnout? Inexplicably, this simple echo upset P., who responded, Yes, burnout, is that a problem?
The point being that not giving offense isn’t easy, even with the best will in the world. Despite my failing memory, I suffer more and more often from excruciating flashbacks in which I relive moments when I said or did something foolish. The worst, most haunting kind of foolishness is unkindness.
(When I looked into it, I learned that “burnout” is not synonymous with “nervous breakdown,” a term that has fallen into disfavor. A nervous breakdown is a mental-health crisis with a variety of possible causes. Burnout, typically, is a state of dysfunctional exhaustion that results from overwork or from shouldering too many responsibilities for too long. P.’s burnout was presumably atypical.)
Tropical Clouseau P. suddenly stops. “I’m feeling sick,” he says. He puts a hand on his stomach.
We’re standing in front of a deli. “Let’s get you some water,” I say.
I buy P. a bottle of water. He takes a couple of sips.
The deli is filled with cool air and has a little window counter with barstools. P. and I take seats.
“Drink more,” I tell him. “Drink all of it.”
He does as I say. Then I buy him a second bottle and get one for myself, too.
We sit next to each other, rehydrating. Since we’re in a deli and not in a restaurant, I permit myself a glance at my phone. There is no trace in my communications history of anyone named Simon Morgan.
One New Yorker after another walks past the window. I’ve lived in this city for a quarter century, and I fear that I am falling out of love with it. But this is a nice moment.
“See that?” P. says. I did see: in front of our noses, a car has quickly and perfectly reversed into a tight parking spot. “That’s a light secret.”
I say, “Parking skillfully?” The driver has gotten out of the car and is looking for something in her pocket. Now she disappears from view. Who is she? Where is she bound? “I thought it was about secretly doing good,” I say. “You know—like a mitzvah, but on the down-low. Schindler. The Scarlet Pimpernel.”
P. shakes his head. “It’s anything that’s admirable,” he says. “Anything that would make people think better of you.”
He has finished his second bottle of water. “I’ll walk you home,” I say. When he protests that it’s out of my way, I insist.
We part company at the corner of his block. “You helped me out today,” P. says. “You’re a good friend.”
Am I, though? What P. doesn’t know, because I have kept it from him, is that a fingerprinting outfit is located a mere stroll away and I planned to go there even before I suggested lunch. In other words, even as I was apparently thoughtfully accommodating P. by walking him home, in secret fact I was not going out of my way for his benefit. It makes me feel bad. I have failed to act with the uberrima fides expected by good friends and insurance companies.
Superior Hand Analytics is an authorized fingerprint taker. Its premises are in Suite 914 of one of those beautiful midtown loft buildings filled with miscellaneous little enterprises and crazy people. I once had a financial adviser who worked in one of those buildings, about whom it was whispered that he had murdered his wife. When I arrive at Suite 914, I am met by a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet. It looks like a thoroughly temporary setup—one of those sublets granted for the duration of a lacuna in the lease. Then, from a partitioned area behind yonder photocopying machine, the hand analyst materializes.
She accepts my paperwork and bids me sit down. She takes hold of my left hand. Starting with the thumb, she seizes my fingers one by one and presses them, with a little side-to-side rocking motion, into the ink pad, repeating the process with the fingerprint sheet. She has a firm, kind, thrilling touch. Who is she? What is her story? What path has she taken, what seas has she sailed to be here with me, holding my hand?
“Can I ask how you got into this business?” I ask.
She presses my little finger onto the paper. “Army.”
Army? Interesting!
“Mm,” she says. She points at the paper. “See? You got no good prints there.”
“I don’t have fingerprints?”
“You got poorly defined prints. It happens. The ridges wear out. We see it with nurses—always scrubbing up. You a nurse?”
Either she’s mocking me or she’s curious. “A nurse? No, I’m not a nurse.” I tell her, very generally, about the work I do.
The hand analyst grips my hand some more, authoritatively. I’m sure she made sergeant. I’m sure she is a fine soul. She says, “That work make you wash your hands a lot?”
“No,” I confess. However—I decide not to tell her this—I am a diligent hand washer. I don’t hesitate to use a little wooden nail brush on my fingertips. Is that strange? Am I an outlier?
She tells me not to worry, it’s all going to be O.K., the F.B.I.’s going to have plenty to work with. My face must have expressed something, because now she’s saying, “That’s where the prints go—Federal Bureau of Investigation. You didn’t know that?” She rerolls one of my problematic fingers in the ink, blackening it even more intensely. “Yes, sir—eff, bee, eye.”
When she’s done making prints, she takes each darkened finger in turn and repeatedly yanks on it with a towelette. Very soon, my hands are clean and she must let go of them, and there is nothing to be done.
T hat night, I have a dinner date with my friends Fred and Sejal at their home, in Brooklyn. I drive across the Triborough Bridge in the bright early evening, and soon after I catch full sight of summery Manhattan Island, its newest, tallest towers rising as if from a meadow. It is beautiful to behold, even in dark times.
I arrive a little early. What’s his name, the son, whom I have known since he was a baby, now transformed into a long-limbed high schooler, thunders downstairs to answer the door. Sejal is covering the table with a cotton sheet brightly patterned with orange-and-yellow circle segments. “It’ll be cheerful,” Sejal says. “Or is it too wrinkled?”
Fred says, “Too wrinkled? Nobody cares about wrinkles anymore.”
He is cooking Norwegian halibut with green olives and calamondins. Calamondins, he teaches me, are a small, sour citrus fruit. They have recently appeared on the little calamondin tree that grows in the pot outside the front door. You remove the seeds, roast the orange globes atop the fish, then eat them, peel and all. Fred says, “I hope you guys will like it—but I’m not going to stress about it. That would be meaningless stress. I don’t do meaningless stress. Not anymore.”
“What,” I ask, “would be meaningful stress?”
“Meaningful stress,” Fred says, “is when you’re digging children out of the rubble.” He gives me a hug of welcome.
Boy, it feels good—the hug, the home, the hope. I want more of it. I want to see more of fortunate people—men and women with strong marriages and functional children and healthy parents and happy lives.
The sound of laughter reaches us. It’s Werner and Nicky. “I’ll get it,” I say.
When I open the front door, the racket of a helicopter suddenly fills the air. It is at once terrifically loud and invisible, as if made by a god. The three of us stand on the stoop, looking skyward.
Sejal’s voice says, “Come in, come in, I’m so sorry, just ignore it, it’ll go away.” Werner answers her with a hug so powerful that he fractionally lifts her off her feet.
“O.K.,” Sejal says, and laughs, then double-locks the front door.
As Fred is serving drinks, a deep physical vibration passes through the house. “It must be right above us,” he says, going to the rear window. He peers out. “Who knows what they’re looking for this time.” He locks the back door. “Now it’s moving away.”
It’s true: the chopper is less audible.
It is my duty, I feel, to lighten things up. “I almost fell in love today,” I declare. Naturally, everyone is curious. I describe my visit to the hand analyst and tell of how she carefully held my hand.
“That’s such a lonely story,” Sejal says.
“You gave your fingerprints to the F.B.I.? Are you out of your mind?”
The person saying this is Werner. He and I are acquainted, sure, but I wouldn’t say we’re friends. We’ve met only at dinners hosted by Sejal and Fred, who got to know Nicky and Werner because they and their children were in a COVID pod together in Montauk. I, who was getting divorced at the time, was in a heavenly pod of one.
“It’s just routine,” I tell Werner. “You know—criminal record, identity history . . .”
Werner says, “Identity history? Who has an identity history? What does that even mean? What are we doing here?”
The chopper is back, louder than ever.
“Hey, guys.” It’s Fred, who has been peering out of the front window. “Get over here. There’s something you need to see.”
We all inspect the street for something untoward.
“I don’t get it,” Nicky says.
“Our cars!” Fred shouts. “Look at them! All parked in a row! Right in front of the house!”
We laugh. “Oh, Fred, you’re so funny,” Nicky says. Fred notoriously claims that his block, on which cars are parked diagonally to the curb, like police cars outside a police station, is the best block for parking in New York.
Of course, all this puts me in mind of P. and his crazy theory of the unacknowledged parallel parker. When we are seated and eating Fred’s (delicious) halibut, I make a second announcement: “I had lunch with P. today.”
“How is poor P.?” Sejal asks.
“Why ‘poor’ P.?” Fred asks Sejal.
Werner says, “Is this the P. who . . . ?”
Fred says, “Yup.”
“And you had lunch with him?” Nicky says.
I look around the table. “We go way back,” I say.
“Did he say anything to you?” Nicky demands.
“If you mean—no, he didn’t. It didn’t come up. Why would it?”
“Because you ‘go way back,’ ” Nicky says, actually making quote signs.
The house is shaking. Red flashes and white flashes of electric light enter from the twilit street. “Now what?” Fred shouts.
Everyone follows him toward the lights and the noise. “Stay inside,” Fred sharply tells his son, who has joined us. And there, visible at last, is the glittering police helicopter, hovering above the street, then banking out of sight. While the others stay at the front window, discussing what they can and can’t see and what may or may not be afoot, I drift away. I want to keep my distance from Nicky. Why was she so rude to me? Is P. her foe? Am I her foe, too, on account of my lunch with P.? Is it possible that during our very occasional dealings I once hurt her feelings? Did the hand-analyst story bother her?
Who knows. Who cares. Human society suddenly feels overwhelmingly trivial and stupid and not worth the trouble.
There are two boys in the back yard. I see them clearly enough from my vantage point at the rear window. They are crouched under the metal staircase that leads down to the garden from the floor we’re on, the parlor floor. The boys are in their mid-teens, I’d guess. They are trying to hide among the gardening equipment. The bigger one is holding the shoulders of the smaller one, whose hands cover his own ears. Both look terrified.
Fred approaches me. “See anything out there?”
I shake my head.
The helicopter roar subsides. Everyone returns to the halibut.
Werner speaks up. “You want to talk about parking? Here’s something that really shook me.” When he’s satisfied he has our full attention, he goes on, “So I’m at this function thing, talking to these guys—reinsurance guys. You know what one of them says? On his block, which is in Brooklyn, on his block, people have started not moving their cars on street-cleaning days. They’re just leaving the cars on the street.”
“Why would they do that?” Sejal asks.
“Why? Because it’s easier to pay the sixty-five-dollar parking ticket.”
“Where is this block?” Fred asks. “I’m going with Cobble Hill.”
“Carroll Gardens,” I say.
Werner says, “That’s not relevant. The block is not relevant.” He seems upset. “Do we not get that? I’m not talking about parking. I’m not talking about street cleaning. I’m talking about the implications. Do I have to spell out the implications?” He is looking squarely at me, as if I’m the one whose grasp of the implications is in doubt.
The table is quiet, and then Sejal laughs and says gently, “I think we get the implications, Werner.”
Werner says, “I’m sorry, I get worked up much too easily, this country is driving me out of my mind, I didn’t mean to raise my voice, poor Nicky has to put up with it, it’s, it’s . . .” He seems to be choking.
“No need to apologize,” Fred says. “Are you crazy? We’re all in the same boat here.”
I am nodding in agreement—but Werner’s outburst, like his wife’s, was made in a spirit of hostility, with me as the object. Why me I don’t know and don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, the final nail has been hammered into this dinner’s coffin. When the conversation moves on, I privately go my own way. I eat another portion of fish and I drink another glass of wine and I smile, but otherwise I keep my mouth shut. I have not driven across multiple boroughs to be harangued. I leave at the earliest opportunity that’s consistent with not giving offense to my hosts.
Night has fallen. When the dashboard welcomes me with its merry multicolored constellation, I feel halfway home. When I am really halfway home, I remember the two young fugitives. How could they have slipped my mind? They are out there somewhere, enjoying the cover of darkness. Good luck to them!
Three weeks later, I learn that P., who is forty-seven years old, has been dead for several days.
My mother once foretold that I would find happiness with a foreign woman. When I asked why, she replied that a foreign woman was more likely to appreciate my traits. My traits? I said. She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t inquire further. Let sleeping dogs lie.
At any rate: this is my first-ever date with a foreigner. Sometimes I have trouble committing a person’s name to memory, but in this case I am helped by a rhyme. My date is named Martina, and she is from Argentina.
We meet at a tapas bar in Chelsea. She has long dark hair and flashing, kind eyes. We eat croquetas and chorizo al vino and calamares fritos, and we drink Rioja. It is hard to believe that this woman, so balanced and open-minded and uninjured by life, could be single. How interesting to learn about the discothèques of Buenos Aires! How pleasant to reminisce about my childhood in Sacramento! What a happy respite from the dark times! Things go so well that I confide in my companion. The confidence is as follows: I believe that she, Martina, is a fine soul. Martina smiles—whether out of amusement or gratification or embarrassment, I cannot tell. What is a fine soul? she asks. Can you give me an example? By way of an answer, to my own surprise, I talk about P., beginning by explaining that his name was Paolo, but he liked to be called ‘P.’ And suddenly I’m turning my head away from her and drying my eyes with a cocktail napkin and laughing apologetically.
Am I dreaming, or did Martina place her hand on my hand, fleetingly?
I share with her that my old friend P. died alone in his apartment, from natural causes, according to an announcement his family made on P.’s Instagram page, never offering more particulars, which for some reason I found painful; that last Friday I went to his funeral service, organized by P.’s aunt, at a funeral home in New Jersey; that it was a strange and sad affair from my point of view, because the family, which was totally unprepared for the whole business and still in shock, had let it be known that all of P.’s friends were welcome to attend the service, but in the end, other than myself, only two nonfamily people turned up, neither of whom I recognized, not even the guy who shook my hand and said, with a mysterious air of significance, Long time, no see; and that moreover P.’s family, which hails from Maine, was represented at the service only by the aunt and her four daughters and various plus-ones, out of all of whom the aunt seemingly was the only one with any personal knowledge of P., and even then, as her brief eulogy revealed, she recalled him only as an only child in Maine, splashing around on the sand beach in a little yellow sun hat, on Fortunes Rocks Beach, to be exact, and not as an adult in New York, which was why she, the aunt, invited those present, “who I’m sure got to know Paolo much better than I ever did,” to offer their memories of P., whereupon none of us spoke up, in my case because I simply could not recall in anecdotal detail the numerous what-ought-to-have-been rememberable times that P. and I had shared from college days onward, all of it was a fog, I tell Martina, except in one important regard, namely, my heart was not a fog, my heart clearly and truly contained my affection and I guess love for P., but of course this fact about my heart was too solipsistic to mention at P.’s funeral, at which the only truly specific thing about my deceased friend that came to my mind was that he and I had blissfully smoked thousands of cigarettes together as young men, which was another inappropriate fact, in the circumstances, needless to say.
Martina says, “Why so few friends came?”
P., I explain, was funny and thoughtful, always noticing this and that, always good company, a cultured person, always going to movies and art galleries and restaurants, always popular—until the last months of his life, when an ugly rumor cast a shadow over him, a rumor that I would not repeat to Martina, not only out of respect for P.’s memory but also out of my general distaste for ugly rumors, a rumor that naturally caused P. to suffer what must have been a very painful loss of reputation and undoubtedly turned people against him, even in death.
“That is a sad story,” Martina says.
“It is.” I’m tempted to add, The good that men do is oft interred with their bones, but I think that would be stretching it, bearing in mind this is a first date, and in any case I’m not sure I’ve got the quote right. “But to go back to your question,” I say, cheerfully, “let me give you an example of why P. was a fine soul.” This is when I mention P.’s concept of the secret that is the antithesis of the shameful hidden fact, the secret that nobody looks for, the secret whose existence is itself a secret: the light secret. Martina listens and smiles.
Soon it is time to leave. While my date briefly absents herself, I take care of the check—for once, I feel flush, I’ve started my new job—and then she and I step out into the brilliance and kinesis of a timeless, darkless New York night. New York! I suddenly feel very fortunate, and I would like my hand to hold Martina’s. Instead, at her request, I use it—my hand, that is, not Martina’s—to hail her a cab.
She doesn’t answer my follow-up text. Or the text after that. My traits have not travelled.
My practice is to direct unidentified calls to voice mail and to listen to voice messages once a week. Days can pass, in other words, between the receipt of an unidentified call and the moment I listen to the message left by the caller.
This is what happens in the case of a caller with a New York area code who phones twice and, after the second call, leaves a message. Four days go by before I listen to it:
I call Sejal. She says, “Yes, that is weird.”
“He wants to straighten things out? What things? What does he mean, ‘straighten out?’ ”
“Mm,” Sejal says.
“I’m telling you, I don’t know the guy. And there’s zero trace of him online. Is Simon Morgan even a real person?”
“Look, just ignore him. If he starts harassing you, then it’s a different story. But for now do nothing. Don’t even answer him.”
“It’s stressful,” I say.
“It must be,” Sejal says. “Are you O.K.?”
I don’t have to say anything about my ongoing financial difficulties. She knows the score. “Honestly,” I say, “I might be close to burnout.”
About a month later, a handwritten letter arrives in the mail. It’s from Simon Morgan. How did he get my address? I’m frightened, as if a ghost has written me.
The letter begins,
The rest I scan quickly.
It boils down to this: Simon Morgan is a self-described “addict.” As part of his recovery program, he has vowed to make amends for the harm he has caused others. To this end, he wants to remind me of the help I gave him back in the day, help that I offered with a pure heart, help that, until now, he has never acknowledged or thanked me for. Enclosed is a check for two hundred dollars, which is the amount I loaned him all those years ago and never requested repayment for.
I don’t cash the check. How could I? I don’t remember him. When Sejal asks me whatever happened to Simon Morgan, I represent to her that I never heard from him again and that Simon Morgan, if that’s his name, must have got me mixed up with someone else. ♦
