“Bummer. Well, get some rest and feel better quick, okay?” He raised the brown paper Chipotle bag in his hand. “Think it’s rude to eat a burrito in a meeting?”
Shy shrugged her shoulders and smiled, embarrassed that he’d asked for her opinion on an issue of such grown-up, professional importance and embarrassed that he was most likely meeting her mother.
“Ita est vita,” Mr. Streko said, which was the Latin equivalent of c’est la vie. He said it all the time in class when the students moaned about an upcoming quiz or too much homework. “I get weird when I’m hungry.” He chuckled and Shy half smiled back. “Sometimes when I get weird I post dorky Latin quotes on Twitter.”
Shy stared at him stoically. She wasn’t on Twitter, but in about thirty seconds she would be, just as soon as they parted ways.
“See ya,” Mr. Streko called, striding away to make the light.
His Twitter feed was long and adorable, filled with Latin quotes and links to pictures of his enormously fat black cat in comical situations. In one of the pictures the cat was asleep on its back on Mr. Streko’s chest—his bare, muscly, elaborately tattooed, very hairy chest! It was enough to send Shy crashing into a lamppost.
“Sorry,” she apologized to the inanimate object and kept walking. Still staring at her phone, she continued down Court Street to Kane, then onto Strong Place and home.
* * *
As soon as Wendy and Shy left that morning, Roy Clarke had gone out for his morning walk. The sun was bright and the air was crisp and full of promise. Autumn was coming. He loved autumn in America. It was so American. Apple pie. Burning wood. Pumpkins. Mulled cider. Tartan shirts and down gilets. Ambition. It wasn’t the same in England. In England autumn didn’t feel like anything, with the exception of Bonfire Night, when there were bonfires and fireworks and everyone got very drunk and stood outside. Roy and Wendy had decided to get married at the bonfire on Primrose Hill. “Let’s get married then,” he’d said, and she said, “All right,” and then the fireworks began and they held hands with their faces turned up to the night sky, murmuring, “Ooh,” as each one went off. Pure magic.
This particular autumn day felt so promising that he dashed back inside to retrieve his laptop and set out once more with the idea that he’d go and work on his new novel somewhere in the neighborhood. All the autumn energy might somehow permeate his skull, resulting, hopefully, in words on the screen.
“You can’t force these things,” he always told Wendy when he tried to explain why he hadn’t written a new book in six years. She would nod resignedly as he went on, “It’s like a snowstorm, dusting and dusting, building and building, so slowly and quietly, until you look out the window in the morning and find it piled up on the cars and stoops, glistening in the sun, finished and perfect.”
The building-and-building part was the challenge. He’d thought starting with a title would somehow inspire him, so he’d come up with Black and White—two noncolors, unlike the splashy titles of his previous books. But he’d begun to think the new title felt ostentatious and overly ambitious. He would feel obligated to explore race relations and the history of the newspaper trade. He hated even the idea of research, let alone the actual practice of finding information, taking notes, and getting it into his story properly and accurately. All of his other novels had been chatty and witty and not about anything, really, just people from deranged families, talking. Or deranged people starting families accidentally. He preferred to simply make things up. Black and White seemed to build up some kind of expectation that he couldn’t possibly fulfill.
Roy walked down Kane Street to the bicycle path that ran along Columbia Street toward Red Hook in one direction and Brooklyn Heights in the other. Deciding which direction to go seemed like a life choice, very Robert Frost, arbitrary yet not. It might mean everything. Red Hook had a reputation for being cool, full of young men with beards making furniture out of salvaged barns and deer antlers, distilling their own barrels of rye, tending beehives on their roofs, or painstakingly smoking cuts of meat from locally sourced livestock. Roy turned right, toward Brooklyn Heights, a staid and pretty residential neighborhood. The sun warmed the path in that direction, beckoning him. Black and White Black and White. The title did nothing but make him feel anxious. Gold would be better. Gold, like the sun. Gold was glamorous and provocative and wide open to interpretation. Gold. Yes, he could change it. There was time. He didn’t even have a contract for this book, because he hadn’t written anything. There was always plenty of time. The problem was putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and writing something.
Joggers whooshed by him, music blaring from the white pods in their ears, their rhythmic footfalls marching out a mixed tune of Zen and impatience. Roy never felt the least bit guilty amidst the exercising throng. He was trim, in a middle-aged, fleshy sort of way. His clothes from his thirties, when he used to cycle around London all the time, still fit. He was proud of that.
He continued down the bicycle path toward the piers that had been transformed into a sprawling, modern waterside park. There were creatively designed play areas for children—rocky water parks, dangerous-looking rope swings, towering slides, a gigantic soccer pitch, basketball courts, a roller-skating rink, barbecue areas, grassy knolls and beaches, docks for sailboats and kayaks, dog runs, a bridge made of rope and wood, and benches facing New York Harbor and the endlessly entertaining view of the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan off to the right, Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty off to the left. Roy had taken numerous photos of the sunset from there when they’d first moved, and sent them to his young agent in London. She’d assumed he’d used an effect of some kind on his camera. It was that breathtaking.
Lower Manhattan was all tall, sleek steel and glass. Wendy’s office was in one of those buildings. The Brooklyn Bridge hung majestically over the sun-dappled water, as if suspended invisibly from a more old-fashioned place, where everything existed in tones of sepia and brown. He’d read the bridge’s story, how people had died building it, how the men had wanted to give up and the women had shown their mettle. It was the type of story a more ambitious writer might incorporate into a sweeping mega-saga.
Whether they knew the bridge’s story or not, a never-ending queue of tourists tramped across it from Manhattan with no objective except maybe to eat a good slice of Brooklyn pizza. It always alarmed him how many of them there were. Roy turned away from the bridge and circled back toward Cobble Hill. The skyline lowered and his confidence returned. He walked up Congress Street, across Hicks Street and then Henry Street, and into Cobble Hill Park.
It was a tiny, pretty, stop-and-rest sort of park, with carefully tended flowers and protective old trees. A generous number of wooden benches beckoned to him: “Write here!” But writing on a laptop out of doors never worked. The sun glared from the screen and made his eyes tear. He was always too hot or too cold. The benches were hard. There were mosquitoes, barking dogs, screaming toddlers.
He kept walking. A couple of blocks down Henry was a bar he’d passed many times and never gone into. The Horn and Duck was closer to home, but the food was too pretentious—they made their own ketchup; Heinz was better—and the staff were too chatty. He never got anything done there. This bar looked quiet.