Three missed dates. The promised letter of recommendation that never arrives. You keep score mostly by transferring the names of the living, your dearest, to the next book and the next. Buying up, humanly. Who will fit into your narrow pleasure boat? “Finding yourself” means the ways your favorite company mirrors all you’ve founded, all you hope for. You, Foundry, you …

You assemble a community, and, in your early thirties, looking younger, you naturally assume that your assemblage will stay put.

A collector, choosing paintings, has every right to believe those works will not leave home, or fade, or burn up in their frames, right?

Welcome to New York. Welcome to the Lost and Foundry.

JumpStart

he very first time my very first Manhattan telephone rang—an old black rotary that, in memory, seems heavy, carved, and Deco-gloss-important as that movie’s Maltese falcon—it was Robert, joshing. His resonant voice managed a credible Svedish accent. “Is diz Mizzter Hartley Mimzz, der writer? I haf good neeeews from de Nobel Committee! Would tomorrow be acceptable time for home delivery of yer Pwrizze?”

“Finally!” I shot back, ready for wit’s first SAT question. “I can maybe pencil you in, but only before ten. ’Cause after that, I’m booked, bitch.”

Laughing, he liked this. I’d wanted him to. It is hard to express, after so many years of work—after all the writing things down, then cleaning things up—how easy and inevitable our first play felt.

Fun founded itself on our assumption that great work would emerge from us. My starter story contained fifteen hundred sentences, most I’d memorized like Catechism. Fifteen hundred chances to get it right. We felt rewards were due us, if not now … soon. First, glamorous parties to crash. Then masked balls to legally attend, until, eventually, when we were old and forty, such bashes would be big ones thrown for us. Watch.

Robert had phoned to invite me to the opening of something called the Boy Bar. He always sensed, it seemed, the one event in New York each night that the largest number of intelligent people would, next morning, kick themselves for missing. He had wasted not one evening of his five years here. I, clever enough to be teachable, followed all his hints. Followed all his entrances. Bouncers spoke his name, looked my way, paused, then wagged their heads toward side-entrances. Came the first night I heard a girl singer dedicate her next torch song to Robert—pointing out his ringlets so the credit would accrue to her.

I fought to keep my face neutral as I sat slightly to his left, our shoulders touching. It was already at early bubble, RobertRobertRobert. And I, taking lessons, always fully along, if half-smiling, lived three steps behind, checked the coats—his fake fur and my own outmoded camel hair that made me, he said, look like the son of a Mafia kingpin newly enrolled at Andover.