Christ. HowdidI want to do this? We could meet on a street corner, but that seemed crude and didn’t offer me the chance to get to know him better. I could drop it off at his place, thus cementing myself as a stalker. I could ask him to meet for coffee but wasn’t that the gay equivalent of foreplay? Dinner was… too high stakes.
May I take you to lunch?
I debated whether to useMay IorCan I. I didn’t want to sound pretentious (guilty), but Iwasa writer. I’d been raised by two literary agents who never dumbed down their vocabularies for my benefit. Bitzy once told me I spoke like an eighteenth-century poet, which was kind of her. Another descriptor wassnobby as fuck. That, according to one of my exes.
Arden’s response was delayed enough that I had several minutes to second guess my approach and generally work myself into a state.
You may.
He was teasing me, wasn’t he? After some logistical back-and-forth, we settled on an organic farm-to-table restaurant near my father’s agency in NoHo. I’d drop in on Bitzy while I was in the neighborhood.
And I got his number.
“I findit interesting our need to rate things,” he said.
I’d later learn that Arden excelled at throwing out what was the equivalent of red meat to insufferable types like myself, those of us in love with the sounds of our own voices and easily tempted into inconsequential arguments. Then Arden would bow out and simply watch the chaos unfold like a playful imp. He was truly a master of the Socratic method.
“But how else would you know when something’s good or not?” I said, innocent to his ways.
“What is ‘good?’” he posited.
I glanced down at my plate. “This hake is really good.”
“What makes it so?”
“It’s a good filet. Flaky. The fennel gives it a nice zest and the capers just a touch of brine.”
“If that was a simple meal of beans and rice, something that had been stirred in the pot all day long with love from a recipe that’s been passed down from generations, would that also be excellent?”
“Depends on how it tastes.”
“Do you think you’d be able to taste the effort that went into making it?”
“I’d like to think so, but probably not.”
“It’s a shame, don’t you think? To see only the end result of any given thing and not the effort that goes into producing it?”
I reflected on that and, not surprisingly, made it about my own work. My readers didn’t witness the time I spent agonizing over the perfect description of a man’s sneer or the deleted scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. So many beautiful lines, lost. The late nights, groggy mornings, and existential grief that inevitably came with being a writer. I was a professional liar. My livelihood depended on my ability to convince people to believe my lies. What fiction writer didn’t worry about being exposed as a fraud? Maybe I didn’t want people to see the sausage-making after all.
“Do you cook?” I asked.
“I used to cook more. Nowadays it’s mostly salads and smoothies. A stir-fry if I’m feeling reckless.”
Arden was reckless in many ways, but his diet wasn’t one of them. Our waiter came by then and asked if we’d like another cocktail. I didn’t make a habit of day drinking, but I didn’t want our lunch to end so soon.
“Yes, please,” I said. I’d already made it clear that I was paying as a thank you to him for letting me borrow his shirt. “And you too?” I inclined my head in Arden’s direction. His eyes narrowed as if it were a test.
“Why not?” he said lightly.
Why not?Carefree and yet precise in its inculpability. So many of Arden’s responses were some variation of that phrase. To whatever I might suggest, the response was always,why not?I’d thought it was only part of his carefree demeanor. I learned later that its roots went much deeper.
“So, if we were talking about your line of work,” I said, “with the photograph being the end result, we’d have to consider the makeup artist who freshened your face, the creative vision of the art director, the photographer’s skill... For that matter, even your personal trainer who keeps you fit.”
“What makes you think I have a personal trainer?” he asked with a coy look.
“Your impossibly sculpted abs?”
His smile widened, a dimple punctuating his mischievous grin. He never answered that particular question. “You’re right. I get all the credit. It’s not fair.”
