There was beauty, of course, but this was New York City, where beautiful women seemed to outnumber the pigeons that flocked every park and street corner. No, what got me was that in a city of manufactured looks, manufactured personalities, everything calculated and posed, she seemed genuine. Everyone I met those days claimed to earn a living as a musician or writer or actor or painter. Hearing people talk, one could only conclude that the city must have been suffering from an alarming shortfall of waiters and receptionists.
Yet Cynthia didn’t hesitate to tell me that Center Magazine was new and underfunded. Also, that despite having the title of senior editor, she made most of her money working as an administrative assistant for a public relations firm. I revealed my own secret: to help with bills, twenty hours a week I worked for minimum wage at a recording studio.
“Occasionally they let me near the sound console,” I explained. “But mostly I answer the phones, clean the bathroom, and go on sandwich runs.”
“You and I live glamorous lives.” She smiled and patted the back of my hand.
When we left the pub, I walked her to the subway and asked for her number. She had that notebook with her, but she wrote her number on the palm of my hand. We saw each other twice more that week. And for the first time I understood why so many sentimental movies took place in Manhattan. The city’s grit and trash suddenly seemed coated with a romantic veneer. I found myself smiling to pretzel venders and subway-token salesmen, buying candles and artwork to spruce up my crumbling, roach-riddled apartment. And hoping.
The article came out two weeks later. In my view, she’d made the band out to be far more interesting than we actually were.
“You should be our publicist,” I joked.
“Actually, I’ll probably move into PR eventually,” she told me. “It pays a lot better than arts journalism.”
More significant than the substance of this exchange, however, was its location: my apartment. Specifically, my heretofore unremarkable bed, new candles burning on the nightstand, music from a nearby street fair wafting in through the open window.
I leaned over and kissed her. She kissed me back. Then we just lay there awhile, enjoying the music. We were lazing away a perfect, autumn Sunday afternoon, after spending our first night together. Exactly two days before I had to leave for fucking Missouri.
I packed my suitcase, endured a terrifying flight through black thunderstorms, and landed in Kansas City. Rented a Chevy Blazer. Be sure it’s an American car, Nolan had warned. People notice these things. Then drove ninety miles into Missouri’s heartland, to the Albright family farm in Nodaway County.
When I’d met Nolan that first day of our freshman year in college, I’d asked him what town he was from.
“Town?” He’d shaken his head. “No town.” If you needed to send him a letter, he’d said, you used the zip code for Stokesville, five miles to the south.
In the last several years, however, the city limits of Stokesville had expanded those few miles to include the farm and the land around it. Farmers saw the city’s expansion as an opportunity to sell their land for development. Not Nolan’s parents, though, despite their property’s appealing location at an intersection of two county roads. They still worked their hundred-acre farm as the town steadily encroached on them. Driving to the farm, I passed a lot of new construction—a residential neighborhood, a row of stores—and I could see into the future to a time when there would be car dealerships and chain restaurants and gas stations, eventually a shopping mall, and then it would look exactly like the America I’d grown up knowing.
Although Nolan rented an apartment in town, he still referred to the farm as home. From there he ran his campaign. As I pulled up the driveway, a small black terrier ran in front of my car. I stopped the car and got out, and the dog barked comically and spun around in a few circles. A moment later, Nolan came outside.
“When’d you get Cujo?” I asked.
“My mother got him from the pound a couple of months ago. She said she’d always wanted a little dog.”
Nolan’s mother was responsible for his interest in politics. She’d studied political science in college and, for a couple years, had an administrative job at the statehouse in Jefferson City. That was before meeting Mr. Albright and moving to Stokesville, where she became a more than capable farmer.
But in the spring she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. Radical mastectomy, chemo, the whole mess. Nolan hadn’t told me much—it obviously upset him to talk about it—but he did say it’d come as a real shock. His mother had gone to her doctor several months before and been assured that the lump she thought she felt was nothing to worry about.
“How’s your mom doing?” I asked.