2
So, next day, I drove north, out of the city where I’d spent only five days. At least, the moment I was sober enough to muster up the courage to have my dad’s top-down Corvette Grand Sport valeted out of the garage on East Sixty-Seventh and to slip behind the wheel without the risk of a $60,000 insurance claim.
This was before Nick and I’d gotten back in touch—before CNN reported, the following day, about all the people killed in Amsterdam and I’d texted him, all het up. I missed him so much right then, it made my stomach turn. Not the Nick lying in the AMC, all wrapped up, half his face gone, not the stranger I was afraid of, but the alive-and-kicking Nick from three weeks back. Nick, filing the spikes of his crampons in the epicenter of a maelstrom of climbing gear that covered just about the whole top floor of our rented house in Amsterdam-Zuid. Early August, hot, Nick the shirtless-all-day type, broad shoulders bronzed from our ten days in Ibiza in July and aye-aye-aye, more eye candy for me. Me with my e-reader in the door to the roof garden, a pillow tucked behind my back, iced tea in the shade. Ramses, who’d snuggled up on Nick’s down sleeping bag, gazing at us with his inscrutable poker face, managing to look simultaneously bored, annoyed, and self-satisfied.
“The question is,” I said, “why would you not appease me with a Ted Baker bag?”
“Appease? I thought you were so independent.”
“Oh my god. Those shades . . . Is that what you wear up there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sometimes it’s better to shut up. To just shut up and let the moment settle over you. Hear that, Ramses? The silence?”
Ramses looked away with a snigger and twitched his ears. Nick cracked up. “What’s wrong with my sunglasses?”
“Can’t you see?” I put down my e-reader and threw up my arms. “They’re so . . . ‘Come one, come all to our lovely and quaint hiking club.’ But you’re kind of the hiking club type, too, to tell you the truth. You probably got a pair of khaki shorts and Nordic walking poles.”
“I’ve got my Black Diamonds, baby,” Nick said with a deep Elvis baritone, as he expanded his chest and showed me his poles.
Nick, Ramses, our pad in Amsterdam—crystal clear flashes in an otherwise endless universe.
“Boy!” I laughed loud, mocking. “You’re so provincial, don’t you think?”
Shrug.
“Aww,” I said.
I reached over the crates packed with camping gear and patted his arm. Nick pretended to lash at me with his poles.
“Yeah,” I continued, “resort to physical violence. So alpha. Sly way of shifting attention from what this is really all about: whether or not you’ll pay me back with a Ted Baker bag, for the fact that you’re abandoning me again and laying your life on the line for that stupid hobby of yours.”
“So, if I got it right, I can buy off my climbing vacation with a bag.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding firmly.
“Like a kind of life insurance.”
“Exactly.”
“Because that will alleviate my death.”
“You got it.”
“Because then you’ll have a Ted Baker bag.”
“I wouldn’t want you to miss seeing me being profoundly happy, even for a bit.”
“Jerk,” he laughed. “You’re bad, you know that?”
My parents in New York, Pa and Ma Avery, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to have deduced by now that they’re more than just a tad affluent. Although a large chunk of Hugh Avery’s capital is in real estate and equities, he still made sure Julia and I had an ample scholarship that didn’t exactly allow us to lead a jet-set life but sure brought us pretty damn close. “But it’s a one-off,” he had said, when he bestowed it to me on my eighteenth birthday. “It’s enough to get you through your whole study, and if you’re smart, a lot longer, but if you squander it all in one blow, don’t come crying to me. I want you to plan your own finances and be more sensible than your dad was.”
Wealth is riskier than poverty for your average eighteen-year-old—that was the trap he’d set for me. The only trap obscenely rich parents can set for their children in order to make them independent and not irreparably asshole-ish. I fell into it with my eyes open. For two years I was totally out of control. You can probably imagine what those two years musta looked like, and if not, picture Cura?ao and Cannes and Macao, then picture ’tinis in casinos, trippy sex in limos, and you’re getting warm.
Then I met Nick and he managed to tame me. Three months in Amsterdam turned into a year, and a year turned into indefinitely. Hugh Avery’s scholarship was so dried up that I was then forced into a strict multiyear planning regime, but thanks to my savings account, I could afford not only our house in Zuid, where we’ve been living together for almost a year and a half (Nick, since working for Lonely Planet, persistently paying his share of the rent—nice of him, ain’t it?), but also, when the mood struck, every Ted Baker bag that tickled my fancy. Still, one of my favorite pursuits was seducing Nick into showering me with expensive gifts, especially to get him thinking he could prove his love for me by buying me pricey goods. Men get a kick out of that. Even men so way up on cloud nine they’re oblivious to social protostandards like these—even men like Nick.
“Still, it’s not so cool of you to confront me with it like this,” I said, pointing to the chaos in the hall. “Repeat after me: ‘It’s not cool of me to desert you again.’ ”
“It’s not cool of me to desert you again,” he repeated obediently. “Even though in April you couldn’t wait till my flight left. And when I came back home you beat Ramses’s gloomy-face record.”
“Yeah, well, it’s my right,” I said, feigning hurt. Cute, comparing me with the cat. “And anyway, the thing that worried me most then was that you’d forget your MacBook charger somewhere and miss your deadlines. What worries me now is that you’ll plummet to your death.”
“You know how careful I am.”
“And you know that not all the risks are up to you. If you come back dead, I swear I’ll spit on your grave.”
Nick pushed away his backpack and looked at me. “I wish you’d join me for once. That I could share what I’m looking for up there with you.”
“ ‘Hey, Sam, wanna go see some boulders? No Wi-Fi or mochaccinos, and when we get to the top I’ll hold you up like Simba and everything the light touches is our kingdom.’ Sure. Wanna go snorkeling with piranhas?”
He tilted his head. “Hakuna-matata.”