Living in New York seemed like a career in itself: just being there, opening my gills to the grit and heartbeat of the city. The coffee shops were thick with everyone I’d known in college, where I’d understood myself most sharply, my edges contoured by the constant presence of other people: our long chats in empty dining halls, our dinner parties of bland shrimp and burnt rice. We’d spoken without reservation, in arguments and monologues, and there was always someone listening. Drunk, maybe, but listening. What were we going to do next? We spread ourselves like a glaze across hundreds of blocks, across brownstones.

I slept in a room that had been a closet. You could still see the painted hooks where the wardrobe bar had been attached. I came home late, buzzed, and curled into my twin bed with a book of Lorca’s poems about the city: They are the ones. / The ones who drink silver whiskey near the volcanoes / and swallow pieces of heart by the bear’s frozen mountains. I spent my nights wondering: Who were the ones? Where were they drinking?

“You’re like your father,” my mom told me. “You make a career out of all the little things.” She didn’t mean this as a compliment.

My father, no longer her husband, had worked for many years as a personal assistant for an artist named Enrico. Enrico was the unofficial leader of a group of artists known as the Border School. “Rothko at the Dump,” he was called, because he took big heaps of trash and painted them a single color or a wash of two. His pieces were called Dump 1, Dump 2, Dump 3. It was a startling effect—the color so regular and vast, the rustling texture of the rubbish beneath. They made me feel a bit seasick, gave me that heave-ho of wanting to move closer and farther away at once. Afterward I always wondered: What was its purpose, that vertigo? It changed a moment of your life and went away again.

As it turned out, my mother knew me better than I knew myself, because I became a personal assistant as well. I got a job working for a journalist on the Upper West Side whom I called Ms. Z. She had a real name with more letters, but she never quite seemed like a real person, not quite, so I used the Z by itself. Much of New York seemed composed of these types: ideas about people that had become actual people, walking around with scripted lives curled in their guts, ticker tapes of ridiculous words waiting to get spoken.

Every morning I went to Ms. Z’s apartment on Seventy-first, just off the park, and worked in a loft above her living room. Her furniture was ugly and expensive: heavy fabrics with thick tassels and brocade cushions, couches for looking at rather than sitting on. But she did have floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the dark green Ramble. You could see people having small adventures, dropping Popsicles and fighting with lovers.