Going Dutch by James Gregor

Author:James Gregor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

The June days went past like clear windows, each one filled with a brighter picture of sun, cloud, and sky. In the budding skirmish of the heat, Anne and Richard continued their academic routine, beginning their research for the Clio Prize. Richard persisted in making an effort, though with increasing halfheartedness. Sensing this, Anne continued to praise him, but her praise had more to do with him as a person and rather obviously little to do with his scholarship. She said that he was dedicated, patient, and kind—things Patrick, for one, did not say of him. These were not unpleasant things to hear. But he remained firmly an assistant, not a contributor. Like those friends of Toller’s who worked for powerful media figures as sorters of email, bookers of flights, filers of taxes, and impromptu babysitters, he orbited around true talent and made it possible for that talent to express itself.

He had always drawn a great deal of his self-esteem from his involvement with bickering ideas, ephemeral arguments, and paradigm shifts expressed in demure and now increasingly obscure forms of media. He was smarter than most, he’d always thought. But Anne no longer asked his opinion about what they were doing. She went up alone into a cloud of inventive scholarship and didn’t come down again until it was time to leave the library.

Their habit was, when they finished, they would go to her apartment and cuddle on the leather sofa, before getting into bed and launching into the latest ungainly but high-spirited sexual encounter. There was something innocent and adolescent in the novice character of their movements, the fits of athletic clumsiness broken by slumps of reevaluation in which they paused and reset their positions, asking each other what worked best. The bed was like a drafting table and they were collaborating on a big project. Though they directed and trained each other, they did not talk about it afterward. Anne said she had not told anybody yet. It felt too delicate and refined to put into words, a shared conspiracy that might evanesce if exposed. When he heard this, Richard was relieved.

During those times they were not at the apartment or the library—or when Richard wasn’t with Blake, under the guise of seeing his friends that Anne otherwise found conveniently intolerable—they went all over the city to eat, to places that were high on everyone’s list. They waited in line for an hour until their patience snapped and they hissed that to wait for so long was undignified. They went to franchises: Peruvian rotisserie chicken on East Ninety-First Street and burger chains that defied expectations, and they trekked out to distant neighborhoods on Staten Island and to Queens for famed slices of pizza and acclaimed dumplings. They had the duck at Mission Chinese, the blood sausage at Estela, the chicken-liver pâté sandwich at Saltie. They ate with the dedication of food pilgrims whose time was limited, frantic, and exalted.

Based on the photographic evidence posted online, this seemed to

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