The Ramblers

by Aidan Donnelley Rowley

  And now it all makes sense. She doesn’t want him back, but she wants to butter him up and drag this out so he considers forking over a fortune.

  Fuck her.

  1:49PM

  “Not today.”

  He’s been wandering for hours now, stumbling along, lifting his lens again and again to capture things that strike him: an abandoned pacifier on a cracked square of concrete, an elegant old man reading Moby-Dick in the window of a coffee shop, a messy pyramid of trash bags waiting for collection. The details are endless and medicinal almost. They do the trick, anyway; he escapes thinking about Olivia for stretches at a time.

  On Hudson Street now, he pulls out the list he made when he first got back to the city. It’s a list of all the places he wants to see and photograph, places that are lesser known, tucked away, off the radar of most tourists and most New Yorkers even. Odd museums, specialty shops, secluded gardens. For him, it’s never been about doing what everyone else is doing.

  One thing’s clear as fucking day: he’s spent too much time thinking about Olivia. Not today, he thinks. He will put her and the papers out of his head the rest of the day. He will distract himself with pictures and Smith.

  With purpose, he heads to number six on the list: Poets House in Battery Park City, on River Terrace at Murray Street. From what he’s read, it’s a literary center with two floors of sun-drenched spaces overlooking the Hudson, a library of more than fifty thousand volumes, an archive of poets’ recordings and videos, a program hall for readings, an exhibition space and a children’s library.

  After about twenty minutes of exploring, he finds himself on the third floor . . . he reads every little plaque, each small explanation. The poet Stanley Kunitz, one of the founders of the house, purposely left off the apostrophe on poets because “some things must never be possessed but shared.” The words spark something in him. He finds he wants to tell Smith about these words, to discuss them with her.

  He looks down at his watch, feels a wave of anticipation that he’ll see Smith soon. Ever since he got Olivia’s e-mail, he’s felt this almost physical urge to be next to Smith, because when he’s with her, his mind behaves better. Is she just a diversion? He doesn’t know yet, but he feels something.

  How perfect that New York, the muse of so many, should have this place. He thinks of some of his favorite poems: Robert Lowell’s “Central Park” and John Hollander’s “West End Blues” and Amy Clampitt’s “Times Square Water Music.”

  Outside again, he pulls up his own PhotoPoet app on his phone and takes a picture of the sun glinting off the Hudson, a sliver of the house itself in the right-most edge. And then he runs a search for Howard Moss and finds what he’s looking for, a quote about New York poems as “histories of desperation or hope; note-takings of the phenomenal; musings on loneliness, connection, isolation, joy.”

  He loses himself in words, in ideas, in old volumes, in the familiar, in the new. When it comes time to leave, he snaps a few more pictures, pulls out his crumpling list and crosses it off.

  He sets out for SoHo, with only a vague confidence about where he is going. He takes more pictures—of people on the street and in the windows of buses, of old, rusty bicycles and dogs tethered to streetlamps, of a cloud-mottled fall sky.

  3:57PM

  “Do you believe in second chances?”

  At the store, a small, bespoke boutique called Seize sur Vingt on Greene, Tate waits for Smith. He read about the place in New York magazine, this menswear spot for the “young and well funded.” The space has a relaxed vibe to it and smells subtly of leather and exudes a hipster masculinity. He chats with a guy who pulls out thick binders of fabric samples with wild names (“Immigrant Punk,” “Can’t Get Used to Losing You,” “Pontius Pilate”).

  When Smith enters the store, the energy in the air palpably shifts, it literally does, and he feels himself come alive. What is it with this girl? He can’t quite figure it out and the fact that he can’t pin her down intrigues him. He’s always been a quick reader, a swift and solid judge of character, but there’s something exquisitely slippery about her, about her contradictions, about the fact that she toggles between being a snob and being a hippie, a wild child one night and a demure intellect the next, a mixture of safety and risk.

  “Tell me something,” she says by way of hello. “What is this place and why are there tits all over the walls?” She gestures toward the big photographs of women hanging throughout. She wastes no time, begins thumbing through square stacks of elegant, vibrantly colored dress shirts. There are indeed blown-up photographs of topless chicks everywhere.

  Tits. One word and he’s lit. She could have used any other word; he’d have expected her to say breasts or something more proper, but tits. Fucking tits. Yes.

  “I read about it in a magazine,” Tate says. “Come. I have some ideas, but show me what you like.”

  Smith makes her way through the racks of dress shirts and sport coats, a focused no-nonsense look on her face. He watches her movements, how she takes each garment in her hand and releases it and moves on to the next. Her brow furrows in concentration.

  “What about this one?” he says, holding up a black-gray suit. “I can pair it with a skinny blue tie to match your dress.”

  “I can’t believe I tried the dress on for you,” she whispers as her cheeks grow pink. “Not sure that dress is going to be the dress. It’s suffering at the moment.”

  Tate laughs. Thinks of that moment when she appeared naked beside him, hugging a plastic-wrapped dress. As he helped her zip up the back, he willed himself not to get hard.

  “How was last night?” she says. “Did you have fun?”

  He laughs. “It was a standard-issue shit show.” He fights the urge to elaborate. It’s strange, but part of him wants to go there, tell her about the girl who came back to his place, but he resists. He knows that the story hardly paints him in the best light.

  With the help of the salesman, they pick several things for him to try and he slips into the dressing room. When he comes out, Smith looks up from her phone.

  “I like it,” she says casually. “Everyone else will be in a tux, but it’s cool and it suits you.” She grabs a handful of fabric in the back. “That’s better. Can we have this tailored by Friday?”

  The guy from the store nods. “Sure thing. It typically takes a few weeks, but we’ll rush it. Next time, leave yourself some more time and we’ll do something custom and send it overseas for the cutting and basting.”

  “Done then,” Tate says.

  “What about the other stuff? Do you want to keep looking?”

  “I’d rather get out of here and grab a drink with you,” he says.

  Outside the store, Tate looks at his watch. “That took fifteen minutes, you know. When I shopped with Olivia, it would take hours. She would pick everything and perseverate over all the details. It was downright exhausting.”

  “I like to think of myself as decisive,” she says, smiling. “I like what I like.”

  “You do, don’t you?” he says. Yes, shameless flirtation.

  They walk together to Balthazar, a French brasserie on Spring Street. It’s an odd time of day, between lunch and dinner, but they take a seat at the bar. He orders a beer and oysters. She orders a glass of champagne and a shrimp cocktail.

  “I’ve never liked oysters,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “The texture, I guess. I don’t really know. Isn’t it bizarre that there are things we do and don’t do and we don’t even know why?”

  “Yes,” he says, looking around. He’s always loved the restaurant’s jovial, quasi-Parisian atmosphere, the feel of the place with its high-backed red leather banquettes, tall tin ceiling, colossal distressed antique mirrors, beleaguered tiled floor, bleached saffron walls and front full of windows.

  “I used to come here for brunch all the time in the years right after college,” she says. “We’d gorge on fries and drink endless Bellinis. God, that was fun.�
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  “I came here a bunch then too,” he says. “I wonder if we were ever here at the same time. Bizarre to think about, right? Anyway, tell me something. Tell me about your work.”

  “Really?” she says, laughing. It’s a fucking sexy laugh too, deep and throaty. “I’m sorry,” she says, composing herself. “I just find it comical that I’ve burdened you with my deepest secrets, that you’ve witnessed me hunched over a toilet bowl, that we just speed-purchased formalwear and now we are dipping into the stiff get-to-know-you, tell-me-about-your-work chat.”

  “And, footnote, I’ve seen you naked,” Tate says. “You forgot to mention that detail.”

  “What?”

  “Yes,” he says. “You didn’t exactly sequester yourself to try on the dress. You just stripped down. I had no complaints. None. None. Not a one.”

  Her face is red. Through her embarrassment, she simpers.

  “Listen. You’re totally gorgeous and you know you are, so let’s skip the coy fretting. I’m just going to have to get that image out of my head as I fumble to have a serious conversation with you about our respective professional pursuits. Tell me this: The Order of Things? You a big Foucault fan?” he says, running his finger around the rim of his glass.

  “Not really. Sure, I read the book. Not sure I understood a word of it, but I liked how he explored the relationship between power and knowledge. I pretty much just thought it was a fitting name for my business because, well, I deal with the order of people’s things. And I figured it would impress the academic snobs like us who even know who Foucault is. I know that all of this still has something to do with trying to impress my father. He’s never approved of my work. He thinks it’s beneath me and horrifically noncerebral and he huffs and puffs, but he’s also the one who tossed some seed money at me so I could get things going. I know I’m lucky to have their financial support, but it has its strings. Every now and then, he asks when I’m going to throw in the towel and do something real and it just makes me want to work harder. It’s fucked up. Thirty-four years old and I’m still on a quest for parental approval. And now I’m writing a book and the truth is I have no idea whether I really want to be writing a book, but I know being a published author will impress him. It’s messed up.”

  “Tell me about the book,” he says.

  “Who knows if it’ll ever really happen, but I kind of love it. There’s something really cool about taking my laptop to a coffee shop and chipping away at it. Being in the mix of all of these creative, quirky New Yorkers. It’s about chaos theory and cognitive dissonance. And the butterfly effect, applying these principles to questions of domestic order.”

  “The butterfly effect?” he says.

  “You familiar?”

  “Barely.”

  “Okay, so the idea is that small differences in initial conditions yield widely divergent outcomes for dynamic systems, rendering long-term prediction generally impossible.”

  “Okay, Señorita Wikipedia, English please.”

  She laughs. Tries again. “Okay, think about this. A hurricane’s formation might be contingent on whether or not a butterfly far far away flapped its wings weeks ago. Or maybe you’ll do better with a pop culture example? Did you ever see that Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors?”

  “About a dozen times. Olivia was marginally obsessed with Gwyneth.”

  “Full disclosure: so am I. Anyway, think about it. A small thing like slipping through the sliding doors of the subway or waiting for the next train can make a huge difference in your life.”

  Tate nods. Now he understands. What if he’d never caught Olivia in the act with that bastard partner? Would he be sitting here right now? What if he never took that fateful surf trip to Malibu with Arun where they came up with the idea for PhotoPoet?

  “I get it,” he says. “Like what if I said fuck it and didn’t head to the game last weekend. This conversation wouldn’t be happening.”

  “Exactly. And I think there are really interesting applications in my work. People get so overwhelmed by all their stuff, by the clutter that accumulates, but what I try to teach them is that all they have to do is start very small. Pick one drawer or shelf and clear it. And then move to the next thing. Sorting through a pile of documents or clearing out your e-mail inbox can literally change your life. It’s kind of interesting though because, sometimes, I have a hard time determining whether this book ambition is all fueled by an authentic desire to explore these things or whether I’m trying to convince myself, not to mention the parental units, that there is some academic merit to the work I’ve chosen, you know?”

  “I do know,” he says. “The whole parental approval thing sounds very familiar. My folks are thousands of miles away and yet I find myself wondering if they will ever approve of this photography thing. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with my poor mom about it, trying to explain what I do each day, how important it is to me. But she’s just a mom, worried that I’m lonely. Truth is, sometimes I am, but isn’t that just the way it is?”

  Smith nods. “I think so. I feel it too and I’m around people all the time. I wonder if it’s all this social media stuff, you know? We feel like we’re connecting, but we’re really disconnecting, creating empty little dopamine rushes for ourselves.”

  “Yes,” he says. “The truth is that I feel less lonely than I have in years because I’m actually out in the world, connecting with people, looking at them, into their eyes, speaking with them sometimes. And I have this guilt because I actually created one of these apps that take people away. I love the product, that people can marry images and words, but they’d be better off putting the phone down entirely. I bet your work is really about the people too.”

  “Completely. I get this direct window into lives. It’s never just about the home. There is heartbreak and happiness and love and loss. Just yesterday, I helped this woman sort through her husband’s things. He died eight months ago. And we didn’t just make piles. We talked. About her three sons, about Thanksgiving, even about Sally’s wedding, and that was the perfect example of me being affected by my work, you know? I walked out of there being like, shit, even if you find the right guy, he might just die. Or here is this woman my age and she’s already had a husband and three kids and I feel this stupid panic.”

  “But isn’t panic so counterproductive? I mean, if we flip out because time’s passing, aren’t we poised to miss it? That’s what pisses me off, you know? I’m telling myself that I want to get on with things, stop thinking about the past and forge this healthy new existence here, but then I drown in drink and get all fucking nostalgic and then I just feel like all kinds of shit.”

  “Cognitive dissonance,” she says, nodding. “You tell yourself you will behave one way and then you do the opposite and then you feel this toxic internal inconsistency plague you. Believe me, I’m familiar. What you can do is change your outlook and cut yourself some slack about the fact that you are in no position to move on yet and just keep doing what you’re doing, or you can change your behavior so it’s more consistent with your goal, right?”

  He nods, trying to understand this. She’s fucking smart, this one. He orders another round of drinks. Smith grows quiet and shifts on her stool.

  “Tell me something,” she says, mischief flickering in her eyes. “Do you really like photography or are you doing it because you can?”

  Who is this girl and how, in a few days, does she know just how to call him on his crap?

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he says.

  “You sold your company. You have money. You don’t need to work. Trust me, I know the type,” she says. “And there’s nothing wrong with taking time and having a hobby, but a hobby is different from work.”

  “Shit, you sound just like my mother,” Tate says, sitting up straighter in his chair, taking a long swig of beer. “I’ve been pulling long nights working on these insipid grad school essays. Not sure I’d be doing that if I didn’t give a shit, right?”
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  She shrugs. “People go to school all the time because they can’t figure out what else to do. I’m just saying you should figure out your story. Because if you have money, some people might assume that you’re just having fun, just doing something to fill time, and it is up to you to show them that you are serious and that you want to be taken seriously. My work, for example, is just that—work. It’s not some cute little thing I do to occupy myself. Despite what my parents think. Despite what I sometimes think.”

  He watches her get riled up and feels even more drawn to her. There is passion in this girl, anger of uncertain origin, vitality.

  The waiter appears with the oysters, mumbles something about them, but Tate isn’t focusing on the waiter.

  “And as for the money thing,” he says, picking up an oyster, letting it slide down his throat, “I’ve promised myself I won’t let it change me, but what I want to know is whether it’s actually up to me. I mean, here I am, in the middle of the day with a knockout drinking and scarfing five-dollar oysters? I suppose I’m eating my words.”

  She smiles. “I think it’s at least partially a choice. I mean, I look at my father and he’s done really well for himself and he’s proud of that because he didn’t come from a lot, but it’s up to him whether he puts it away, or donates it to good causes, or spends an insane amount on his daughter’s wedding, right? I mean, I love the man, I do, but he’s doing everything in his power to make sure the world knows how much he’s worth, which, for the record, drives my mother crazy. You just wait. This wedding is going to be off the hook and I’m pretty sure I’m going to feel really embarrassed by all of it, but then I’m also like, who am I to judge? What’s to say there’s anything wrong with any of that? I tell myself I have different sensibilities, that I’m far more down-to-earth than my father, but maybe that’s bullshit, right? I mean, I live in the San Remo. My clients have multiple homes. Anyway, you’ll figure it out. Whether you want to be the low-key incognito rich guy or shout it from the rooftops. I look at you and tend to think you’re in the former camp, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s too soon to tell. Anyway, did you expect this? That your idea would lead to all this?”