Morning traffic—human and vehicular—moves up Sixth Avenue in ever-shifting patterns. Each body, car, and bicycle is a water molecule that would travel in a straight line at maximum speed if not for all the other molecules competing for space in an ever-shrinking channel, like an ocean strained through a fire hose. It is a sea of earbuds, bodies moving to their own beat. Working women in sneakers text on the go, their minds a thousand miles away, cabdrivers half watching the road and half scrolling through messages from faraway lands.
Doug stands outside the entrance to the ALC Building smoking a final cigarette. He has slept three hours in the last two days. A smell test of his beard would yield hints of bourbon, drive-through cheeseburgers, and the peaty curl of Brooklyn lager. His lips are chapped, synapses firing too fast and in too many directions. He is a revenge machine, one that has convinced itself that truth is subjective, and that a man wronged has the right, no the moral duty, to Set The Record Straight.
Krista Brewer, Bill Cunningham’s producer, meets him in the lobby, moving at a near run. She actually pushes a black guy with a messenger bag out of the way, her eyes locked on Doug’s shuffling form.
“Doug, hi,” she says, smiling like a hostage negotiator who’s been taught not to break eye contact. “Krista Brewer. We spoke on the phone.”
“Where’s Bill?” Doug asks nervously, having second thoughts. He had a vision of how this would go in his head, and this isn’t it.
She smiles.
“Upstairs. He can’t wait to see you.”
Doug frowns, but she takes his arm, leads him past security and onto a waiting elevator. It is the morning rush, and they are packed in with a dozen other molecules, all destined for different floors, different lives.
Ten minutes later, Doug finds himself in a chair in front of a triple mirror framed in bright lights. A woman with a lot of bracelets brushes his hair and puts foundation on his forehead, dabbing him with powder.
“You got plans for the weekend?” she asks him.
Doug shakes his head. His wife has just thrown him out of the house. He spent the first twelve hours drunk and the last six sleeping in his pickup truck. He feels like Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that same sense of crazed loss (so close!), not that it’s about the money. It’s the principle. Eleanor is his wife and the kid is their kid, and, yes, $103 million (plus 40 more for the real estate) is a lot of money, and, yes, he has already shifted his worldview, luxuriating in the idea that he is now a man of means. And, no, he doesn’t think that money solves every problem, but certainly it will make their lives easier. He can finish the restaurant, no problem, and finally finish that novel. They can afford child care for the kid and maybe fix up the Croton house for weekends while they move into the town house on the Upper East Side. The Batemans’ cappuccino machine alone is worth relocating for. And, yes, he knows that’s shallow—but isn’t that what the whole artisanal return-to-simplicity movement is all about—making sure that every single thing we do is thoughtful and perfect? That every bite of every meal, every step of every day, everything from our hemp throw pillows to our handcrafted bicycles is like a koan from the Dalai Lama.
We are the enemies of industrialization, killers of the mass market. No more “10 billion served.” Now it’s one meal at a time, eggs cooked from your own chickens. Seltzer infused by your own CO2 tank. This is the revolution. Back to the soil, the loom, the still. And yet the struggle is hard, the way each man has to claw his way into some kind of future. To overcome the obstacles of youth and establish himself without getting lost along the way. And the money would help with that. It would remove the worry, the risk. Especially now, with the kid, and how hard that can be—like, say, if you weren’t really ready yet to have that much responsibility, to put your own needs aside for the needs of something small and irrational that can’t even wipe its own butt.
In the chair he’s starting to sweat. The makeup lady blots his forehead.