In the morning, the light gray around me, I awaken. I am alone in bed, under the covers—when did that happen?—and can hear the stirrings of morning through the still-open window. There is a dampness to the air that will soon give way to another day of summer’s heat. I remember similar days from my childhood, when I would come awake in my room, the house silent around me, my mother not yet having roused herself, when—for a brief moment—I could imagine myself alone there.
I sit up in the bed, look around for my clothing, which is missing. I shrug, step down the hall to the bathroom, take advantage of it to clean up, helping myself to Tom’s shampoo and soap, rinsing my mouth out until I can get to a toothbrush. The water is tonic to the funk stuck to me, helps me wake up. Today, I think, will be a day of figuring things out… or, for all I know, Tom may have had second thoughts and wants to reconsider the whole thing.
I dry myself off, cinch the towel around me, go in search of my clothing, and Tom.
As I step out into the hallway, the smells of coffee and breakfast greet me, and I smile; Tom has been busy. I pad down the hall and the creaking stairs and into the kitchen. Tom looks up as I enter, smiles at the sight, gestures with a spatula dripping pancake batter.
“Well! Another nearly naked man in my house. Must be Sunday.”
“I just assumed this was how you wanted all of your guests dressed for meals. By hiding their clothes.”
“Well, it did work for the mayor and his wife.” He scrunches his face up. “Although he did seem rather keen to do it, I must say.” He gestures again with the spatula at a neat stack of clothing—mine—on the table. They’re clean and still warm from the dryer. I drop the towel and dress myself in the kitchen under Tom’s watchful gaze.
I watch a curl of smoke rise from the sizzling pan. “Careful,” I caution. “You’re about to burn.”
“Oops—shit,” he mumbles, turning back to the pan, flipping the pancake over and back down. “Little carbon never hurt anyone… ” he mutters.
I chuckle and go to him, embrace him from behind, kiss his neck. He leans into me as I nuzzle him.
Another pan holds sausage patties; I can’t think of the last time I had sausages like that.
“Can I help?” I ask.
“Uh, sure. Set the table? Coffee? Juice, if you want it. Milk.” He grins. “Lots and lots of milk.”
I pull away and clatter through cabinets until I find what I want, set up two places on an old enamel-topped table I remember from before. I pour coffee for myself and add a dollop of cream and a bit of sweetener.
“Oh. I got you a paper,” he adds.
We’re stuck between Lexington and Louisville, and Cincinnati’s not all that far away, so it could be anything. Much to my surprise, when I glance at the thing sitting on the table, it’s the Times. It’s strange to see it here, a little bit of home and it makes me realize how much I’ve missed the city. I look up at Tom in surprise.
“You take this?”
“No. I got it for you.” He makes a face. “Well, for me, too, I guess.” He smiles. “Took me forever to find one, by the way.”
I chuckle. “I bet. Probably not much call for it, here.”
“Believe me… you don’t want to know what people here think of that paper.”
“I can imagine.”
I flip through the paper; it’s last Sunday’s, about as thick as a phone book. One of my indulgences is to treat myself to the paper every Sunday morning, lingering over it with coffee and breakfast.
“You been through it, yet?” I ask.
“A little bit. It’s… interesting. Different take on things.”
“And then some. It’s what papers should be. Hell, it’s what papers used to be.”
“It just reminds me that I have a lot to learn.”
“Well, you don’t have to go through all of it. I doubt that we’re going to care much about real estate in the Hamptons.”
“You never know… ”
I mock surprise. “Well! Just how much do you stand to clear on this deal?”
He gives me a wry grin. “Don’t know yet. Probably something in the high four figures.”
“Oh.”
He chuckles. “Kidding. I think.”
Tom turns back to breakfast as I start to piece apart the paper, skimming the headlines as I do. Tom’s comment about needing to read the paper brings to mind what I’d done when I knew I was going to accept the offer in New York. I’d combed every bookstore in Lexington trying to find one, ended up with a week-old edition that I’d pored over religiously; it had seemed like reading a newspaper from some foreign country, so alien did it seem to me.
—
I come up for air when Tom gets up to make another pot of coffee. He comes back as the coffee maker starts to wheeze and hiss.
“Sorry,” I say. “This is one of my favorite things to do.”
“So, basically, it’s like reading War and Peace every week.”
“Well, you pick and choose. I don’t read sports.”
“I saw that they actually talk about what you do. Architecture. You ever end up in here?”
I nod. “A few times. I can show you the articles. Not that I’m, like, keeping a scrapbook or anything.”
He grins. “Can’t wait to see it.”
“It is strange, to see yourself talked about like that.”
“My famous boyfriend… ”
“Well… ”
He makes a face. “There was an article about me in the Lexington paper a few months ago. They managed to misspell my name. Twice.”
“Well, there you go. My famous boyfriend.”
He chuckles, forks down the last bit of now-cold pancake on his plate, trapped like a fly in the amber-hard syrup, sets the fork down with a clatter. “I guess we need to talk about things. New York.”
I push the paper aside. “Yeah. I owe work a call, let ‘em know where I stand.”
“You got room for me?”
I smile. “Oh, sure. As long as you don’t bring along anything else besides a change of clothes and a toothbrush.”
“Oh, boy… ”
“It’s not that bad,” I say. He gestures to the house, to the expanse of the fields outside. “I know,” I add, sheepishly. “We do have Central Park.”
“And a billion people trying to use it.” He makes another face. “Although I guess this will all seem smaller, once they start building around me.”
“How much are they going to leave you with?”
Tom runs a hand over his scalp. “Yeah… I’m not sure.”
“Well, I mean… are you going to have houses right next to you?”
“Mark, I don’t know.”
I lean back in my chair. “Well, I can look at the drawings… ”
“Drawings… ” Hint of a question, there, in the ellipsis.
“Of what they plan to do with your property.” Tom stares blankly at me; I try again. “Certainly they’ve shown you something.”
Tom thinks about, starts shaking his head slowly. “I… don’t think so. No.”
“Nothing?”
“Well… who would produce that drawing?”
“The developer would. Or his architect.” I go get another cup of coffee, sit back down. “What have they told you?”
Tom scrunches his face up, thinking again. “Uh… not much, not really. Some houses, maybe a little bit of retail out by the highway… a community pool… courts. Stuff like that. Something they’re trying to pass off as ‘new urbanism,’ but beyond that… ”
“But nothing on paper.”
Tom shakes his head.
“Who is this group?” I ask.
“Uh… somebody out of Louisville. I think they’re kinda new to the game. Young, couple of guys… one went to Kentucky, the other went to U of L, so they played up that a little bit. Not that I cared. I just wanted them to give me money.”
We go online, to the developer’s website. It’s slick and sharp, with music and animation and a lot of words and pictures… and says absolutely nothing. There’s no indication that they’ve done any other projects. They are young, genially handsome in a polished and toothy kind of way, little Trump wannabes working with family money, maybe.
An idea begins to take shape.
I mull it over for a long moment, trying to dissect it. My heart starts beating a little faster; could I pull this off? Could I do it? I look at Tom. “I… don’t think they have an architect, Tom.”
He stares back at me, frowning… and then a grin spreads slowly on his face. “I think we might both have interesting phone calls to make,” he says.
—
A week later, Tom and I are in a little café in the Upper West Side, not far from Lincoln Center, not far from the office. Tom’s spent the morning wandering the wilds of Central Park while I meet with the partners and the rest of the office, bring them up to speed on what we all semi-seriously refer to as the “western office.”
I think the city still frightens him, but he’s getting better with it, professes to like it. Give it time, I tell him. He insists on walking everywhere when he’s not with me, not willing to untangle the byzantine maze of the subway on his own.
The afternoon is warm as summer turns over into fall. The park is beautiful, Tom tells me, all the colors of autumn painting the trees. This has always been my most favorite season here, when the rush and heat of summer eases, the tourists go home, the city pauses, takes a deep breath, girds itself for winter.
“Mark.” I hear him, but I don’t. He tries again. “Mark.”
Now I do look up. “What?”
“Where were you?” He’s smiling, but there’s a hint of concern in him.
I smile back. “Sorry. It’s just… ”
“What?”
“The meeting, I guess.” Something…
Tom grins. “They’re finally wondering where you’ve hidden all that money?”
I grin in return. “Oh, no, no, no… that’s safely off-shore. Our accountant was most careful.”
“I thought we had everything tied up in the mail-order bride business.”
I shake my head. “Too risky. Vladimir’s branching out into the arms trade.”
“Oh, good. Much safer.” Tom sobers. “Seriously, though… ”
I think about it. “I don’t know. It was… different. Almost strained.”
“Something go wrong?”
“Noooo… ” I start. “Nothing I can pin down. Maybe it was me being gone for so long. Maybe it was that they really don’t want the work and are just trying to humor me. It’s just… well, it’s like we’re going separate ways. I almost felt like I was a… consultant, or a contractor. Not really a part of things, you know?”
“Mark, you helped start that firm.”
“I know, I know… ” I wave my hands, helplessly.
Tom grimaces. “Would it help if we moved back here?”
“It would, I guess, but—”
“I will, if we need to. You know that.”
I smile at him. “I know you do. But—the two of us? In that apartment?”
He shrugs. “We’ll find a bigger place.”
“Not all that easy, in Manhattan.”
“So, it’ll take time. We can make it work.”
I say nothing, lose myself again in thought. I am dimly aware of the city busying itself around me, am dimly aware of the comings and goings of the servers as they attend to the lunchtime crowd, am dimly aware of Tom across from me, watching and waiting, patient, as I wrestle with demons, real and imagined.
Tom’s hand comes across the table, grips my own. “Mark.”
I look at him, at this kind and beautiful man whom I once let go and now vow never to do so again. I should never have stepped away from him that day twenty years ago, down at the river, but this boy of seventeen saw a future that gave him what he thought he wanted and told him that he had the ability and—more importantly— the desire to go after it. Everyone and everything around him be damned.
I reach back, squeeze back. The gray lifts; the worry and doubt are taken up and dispersed, forgotten. I smile; Tom smiles back.
“What?” he asks. But I think he already knows.
I can do it, I know. It will take time and no small effort, but I can. More importantly, I want to.
“I… might have an idea.”
I pick up my phone off the table between us, about to make a call that will change everything.
Posted 4 January 2025