I'm Glad About You (21 page)

He looked at his watch. It read 5:52. Dinner was at 6. He had eight minutes to kill. His mind was restless, refusing to look at itself, but also refusing to be silenced. His roving attention landed on the paper bag on the bed and was caught with the quick efficiency of a hook landing firmly in the mouth of a trout. He picked up the small package and tilted it forward, allowing the two books inside to slip into his hands.
The Seven Story Mountain
and
The Sign of Jonas.
He had bought them both almost out of a sense of duty, wanting to let all these nice people know that like everybody else who made a pilgrimage to this monastery he was mightily impressed with the famous monk. He glanced at
Seven Story Mountain
and rejected it because that was the one everyone read. The cover of
The Sign of Jonas
presented a photograph of a monk in those robes—which had come to impress him more and more with their straightforward beauty—striding across a lonely landscape. He opened the book and started to read.

Five minutes later, he set the book down, his eyes smarting. The voice of the writer, landing with astonishing clarity across the years, smote him. “I have a peculiar horror of one sin,” the monk wrote. “The exaggeration of our trials and of our crosses.”

Kyle stared at his hands. He felt his heart move.

eleven

A
LISON
M
OORE
hits the big time
. It wasn’t that long ago that she was a total nobody he felt perfectly justified in snubbing at a nothing cocktail party. Now look at her. A gorgeous brunette with a crazy sexy haircut. Shocking green eyes. Great smile. A standard PR shot from some afterparty during the Tribeca Film Festival.
Didn’t see that coming.

Seth clicked the server off and turned his attention to the fucking pile of press invites which had been dumped on his fucking desk in his fucking cubbyhole. There must have been fifty of them, and he was expected to cover them all, in twenty-two days.

The sheer physical impossibility of needing to be two or three places at one time was not actually the problem; the real problem was how utterly fucking boring it all was. He had been on the culture beat at the
Times
for only four months but it was seriously ruining his life. His job was, literally, going to parties and then writing about them, and then fielding phone calls from hysterical press representatives who didn’t like the way he covered the parties.
BAM 50th Anniversary Gala! Tribeca Film Festival Opening Night! 1,000 Stars Fashion Benefit for Breast Cancer! Come Celebrate the New Wing at MoMA! Come Celebrate the Award Honoring Somebody Ridiculously Famous Who Really Doesn’t Need Awards!
The exclamation points were plentiful, the graphics gorgeous, the paper stock superb.

Everybody who knew anything knew this was a total shit gig.
Hi, Jessica! You look fantastic! Can I grab you for a few minutes to talk about your know-nothing role as a gun-toting whore in
Evil Dead 12
? Matthew, hey, how are the kids! Fantastic! How do you feel about being overlooked by the Tonys this year? Nicky, hi, can I grab you for a minute? Just heard about the deal you signed with Warners, congratulations!
You stood in a line and got two minutes of their time as they paraded off the red carpet, on their way to the cocktail event. And then you went to the next one of these things, asked the same questions, and then you went back to the office to type this shit up, and then you went home and thought about murder.

But of course he was surrounded by idiots who thought this whole song and dance was so
exciting.
The would-be models and actresses he met at bars and clubs and parties all over the city couldn’t get enough of it. He had never really had any trouble getting laid, New York was a wonderland of party babes, truth be told, and half the guys in town were gay. A relatively decent-looking, moderately successful writer who had gone to Harvard was never going to have a problem here. But this beat had taken his sex life to a whole new level. The girls who fluttered around these A-list events were international beauties—Brazilian, French, Italian, Swedish—who floated back and forth between Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Cannes, Lake Como—on the arms of some of the ugliest men Seth had ever laid eyes on. They were never terribly interested in talking to him at the different events, where the photographers got much more of their attention, but they were happy to say hello at the private clubs and downtown hipster bars to which he had been suddenly granted insider status. The guy from the
Times
who covered “culture”—God, he couldn’t even
think
of the word now without putting it in quotes—was someone everyone wanted to know.

Arwen the office intern once again had clipped the collated schedule of events to the back of the packet of invites. It made him irrationally angry; he had
told
her repeatedly that he preferred the schedule clipped to the
top
of the pile, where he could glance over it without going to all the trouble of unclipping the entire packet, which made a mess. The fact that she had also left him a red velvet cupcake with a little note pissed him off even more.
Dial it down
, his brain warned him.
She wants you to like her she wants to be a writer you are her hero she doesn’t even get paid don’t hurt her feelings.
He slumped back in his Aero chair and sighed. A cupcake, a fucking cupcake. They were omnipresent these days. You came by them so easily, they had ceased to be special.

He opened the note. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!! the note announced, in capital letters. HAVE A GOOD ONE!!! For a moment his impatience with this overexcited piece of punctuation almost clouded the information that had been presented to him so unexpectedly. But there it was. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!

It’s my birthday?
He thought about it for a moment.
Is it really?

He clocked the date on his computer screen. September 9, that was it all right. How Arwen had found it out was more of a mystery than the fact that everyone else had forgotten it. Birthdays were passé, and generally the source of slightly too-aggressive ribbing in his so-called band of brothers.
How old are you? Thirty-three? Where’s the Pulitzer?
The names of those who had won Pulitzers in their twenties were not something you wanted to think about on your thirty-third birthday, when you were on your way to the red carpet at Fashion Week, so you could write a snappy three-paragraph column for the internet edition of the fucking
New York Times
. Birthdays were a pain in the ass.
Red velvet
.
What the hell is that, anyway?
There was some news item floating around about how they were using ground-up insects as red food coloring because the other stuff had chemicals in it. Ground-up bugs equals
organic
food coloring. Another Pulitzer-worthy bit of information. He picked up the cupcake and tossed it in the garbage can at the side of this desk.

The tents in Bryant Park looked like they had floated down from some other universe. The air was fresh and cool, as an early autumn breeze had swept through Manhattan and contributed to the festive spirit. Elegant men in black suits opened limo doors and held their hands out to the mysterious figures in the backseat, in a gesture of benign invitation.
Come out come out.
Before barreling across the street to plunge himself into this mess, Seth stopped, suddenly taken by the timelessness of the city’s rituals, on a night that was touched with stardust. He would not have been surprised to see twelve dancing princesses hurry by him at the streetlight, eagerly throwing themselves into the celebration.

No such luck.
The red carpet tent was packed and while the evening was cool, there was a sheen of humidity which had gathered, a literal wet blanket, right on top of the crowd of photographers and reporters. Someone should have turned on the air conditioning—he felt sure somehow they knew how to air-condition those fucking tents—but apparently the freshness of the late summer night had fooled the event organizer and her three assistants, who were walking around smiling serenely even though tiny beads of perspiration were popping up all over their faces. As usual, there was a problem, squishing that many bodies into a space that had no circulation. And for all the humid claustrophobia, this didn’t look like much after all. The pretty girls in the photo line were obvious nobodies, certainly nobodies that he was not going to be able to write about for the
Times
. Not even for the online edition.

“Hey, Fraden.” A voice called to him from the crowd of reporters, a hand with a Bic pen lifted itself above their heads.

Most of his fellow culture beat scribes were serious-minded girl reporters with digital recorders, who asked the same questions over and over and nodded professionally as they did so. Lou Schaeffer, on the other hand, was two hundred and forty pounds of sweating romance. Schaeffer thumbed his glasses back up his nose and squinted past Seth, as if something, anything worth writing about, might be hovering. The guy always looked completely out of place at these things. A beached whale with stringy hair, Schaeffer always had three or four pens clipped to the pocket of his bargain-basement cotton shirts; he would have fit in better at a sci-fi convention. But his prose was impeccable. If they actually did give out Pulitzers to losers who wrote about culture on the internet, Schaeffer would have six or seven.

“Who are these chicks?” Seth muttered, squeezing past the tiny girls to take his place next to the beached whale. “Is this the B-list? Are there two press tents?”

“You missed Clooney and the wife, Aniston, SJP, Damon was here, Susan Sarandon, David Geffen showed up—”

“Come on.”

“You’re asleep at the wheel, my little friend. We started an hour ago.”

Was that possible?
Seth checked his watch and ran the times through his head.
Seven p.m., the invite said seven and the screening over at the Ziegfield starts at eight. Is tonight the Ziegfield or is it the fund-raiser for PEN?
He felt a pebble of sweat creeping down the side of his face.
You missed Clooney.
That was a mistake, someone over at the
Times
was going to make note of it. Clooney always stopped to chat with the clowns in the press line, everybody in town would have a decent quote. Except for him.

“Hey, Marissa! How you doing, you look incredible.” Schaeffer waved at a pretty teenager in a peach mini dress. Brown hair curled down her back and a wide belt with the biggest silver buckle he’d ever seen cinched the dress at the waist. Her eyes were bright but honestly, the kid looked like an anorexic ten-year-old. “She’s only got a few minutes, guys,” her publicist announced. He hovered sternly, to make sure they didn’t take advantage.

“What are you working on, Marissa?” Schaeffer was on it. Seth just listened and scribbled down the answers.

“Well, I just did four days on the new Noko Matsui film, that was a total blast.”

“Oh yeah? You like working with Noko?”

“Oh my God, he’s a genius, he’s such a genius.”

“What’s your favorite movie that he’s made?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“Not unless you don’t know the answer.”

“You’re awful,” she grinned.

“I’ll pick one for you. You get to do any action sequences?”

“No, I just got shot.”

“You get to fall off a roof or anything?”

“I did! How did you know?”

How
did
he know?
Seth was convinced that Schaeffer just sat around his apartment all day, surfing the internet and storing every meaningless fact he could find in that fucking big brain of his. One time over drinks Schaeffer admitted he had a photographic memory, which may have been a lie, except for the fact that Schaeffer wasn’t exactly proud of it. He was drunk and morose, and confessing that he had gotten kicked out of MIT for some ridiculous cheating scandal, hacking computers or selling prewritten papers to terrified freshmen, something totally needless and stupid. And now here he was, chatting up starlets and writing dazzling paragraphs about who these pretty girls were dating, or what talk show they were going to be seen on next. Seth didn’t get it. But he liked the guy. Compared to all the vapid know-nothings who regularly showed up on this beat, fat Schaeffer had the air of a tragic desperado about him.

In fact, at that very moment Schaeffer was waving wildly at the next starlet down the line. He was flushed with delight, or that might actually just have been the heat. The whole thing was dreary as hell. Seth started digging through his shoulder bag, looking for the ultra-handy celeb cheat sheet that Arwen always stuffed in there, to let him know who and what to expect at these things. He couldn’t find it. “Shit. I’m taking off,” he said. “Did I really miss everybody? ’Cause if it’s just B-list from here on in, I got two other parties I have to cover before midnight.”