I didn’t really take days off—even the flu just meant less writing—and with all this extra time, I wanted to prep some projects for 2002. I couldn’t endure another story meeting without a hit idea. But I didn’t have any leads, and soon I knew I’d made a mistake by not getting out of the city. Subjects I would’ve once found appealing—movies, TV, books—held only a dim luster. I craved something else, something serious.

At loose ends, I was reminded of how I didn’t have any real friends in New York. I had a name, a decent reputation, but no friends. Of course men were always around, and here and there they could tide me over. I felt at peace in the aging male ambience of my local bar, for instance, where I could watch the Lakers and make savage comments about the opposing team. But as for men my age, men of shared interests and maybe experience, I found it too exhausting to navigate their obvious desires, their readiness, if not necessarily eagerness, for sex, as if sex were higher than friendship.

And despite my best efforts, I’d never made female friends in New York. With depressing regularity, I arranged plans with women that followed the same abortive pattern. Take Annette, for example. Two, three, four times she canceled, citing something vague like not feeling social. It seemed as if the slightest obstacle, just a frigid gust of wind, would deprive Annette of this precious social feeling and set us back for weeks. When at last we got together, the night unfolded with a hyperactivity alien to my idea of friendship. We conversed with terrific vehemence, drinking very hard. Everything had a rushed, wasteful quality, and I came away feeling the night had functioned as a kind of purgative, a way of getting friendship over with. It generated no real intimacy. We never did it again, though when I’d run into her, Annette unfailingly said, “We should get together soon.”

The sheer consistency of the pattern was almost funny, and I could feel a certain pride in how I continued to put myself out there, as if I were taking the high road. But then I was always lonely. In some crucial way I didn’t understand, I remained the youngest cousin, ready to do something dumb for even a false sense of acceptance. I could almost cry at my hairdresser’s tenderness, massaging shampoo into my scalp.

—

And so the call from Roland that empty winter holiday came as a relief. I knew what it meant. We only spoke when we found ourselves within a hundred miles of each other. This wasn’t about friendship. Unless we could fuck, there was nothing to discuss.

“I’ve been transferred,” he announced. “Just landed in Charleston and have to be in San Diego next week.”

“You’re coming to New York?”