At the moment Noah’s train was departing Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station, Bart Gustafson awoke, tangled in sheets. He looked around the room in confusion before remembering that he was not at home in Southampton, but rather on a sleeper-sofa somewhere near Lincoln Center. He stretched, feeling an unfamiliar stiffness in his back brought on by the thin mattress.
“Jon?!” he called out to his host as he staggered to the kitchen. Jon wasn’t there, but the coffee maker was turned on and the urn was half full. He poured a mug and sat, taking in the view of the traffic backed up on West Sixty-Fifth Street.
He wasn’t disappointed that his host was out of the apartment. He was a nice enough man, but he was also close friends with Bart’s employer…which meant that most of their conversation revolved around his employer. Bart didn’t take many days off from his job, though, and talking about his boss on a rare vacation day didn’t serve his vacation purposes.
The previous night had been a case in point. After Bart arrived back at the apartment—far too early, thanks to the unwanted attention of the bartender at The Penthouse—Jon had kept him up until after midnight reminiscing about “the old days.” While Bart certainly appreciated the free place to crash while he was in Manhattan, he was beginning to wonder if it was worth it, since the point of his getaway was to get away.
Okay, he thought, as he refilled his coffee mug, it was Wednesday, the second day of his brief vacation, and he was in Manhattan, which meant he could not—under any circumstance—spend the day in front of the television. And, to the extent he could avoid it, he would also try not to talk about work or work-related people.
He drained his coffee and walked to the shower, determined to make a vacation for himself.
“You shouldn’t have come.” Thus spoke Max Abraham.
“I had to come.”
Max shrugged. “Eh. So how’s life?”
“That’s not the big news here, is it?” Noah sat in the cold plastic chair next to his father’s bed. “How are you?”
Max raised one of his bushy eyebrows in his son’s direction. “My life continues. All in all, I suppose that’s big news. It’s certainly good news. For me, at least.”
Noah smiled as he watched that bushy eyebrow hiked up on his father’s forehead. For a moment, he wasn’t just Max Abraham, father, but Max Abraham, New York City icon. In his frequent eagerness to be his own man, Noah sometimes forgot that he also enjoyed his status as the son of one of New York’s most recognizable celebrities.
Max Abraham was one of the more flamboyant members of the New York City legal community. For several decades, he had represented actors, captains of industry, mob figures, cardinals, and politicians, and while it was true that his reputation for self-promotion exceeded that of his reputation for legal skills, he had managed to make untold millions of dollars in the process. Through pluck and nerve—and knowing when to call in the experts to shore himself up—he had managed to become so well known that not only was he a regular feature of the New York social scene, he was a recurring character on Saturday Night Live known as “Famous Lawyer Abe Maxham.” Pure coincidence, the show’s producers claimed, when Max threatened to sue. Pure coincidence…right down to those uncontrollable eyebrows.
Of course there had been no lawsuit. Max had bluffed, but would have never followed through. The Saturday Night Live parody validated his status as an iconic New Yorker, a status Max valued dearly. The lawsuit had been nothing more than a strategy to parley the SNL caricature into a few additional mentions on Page Six. It had worked—those things usually did—and even that morning as he rested in his hospital bed, Max was strategizing on how best to publicize his heart attack without scaring off potential clients.
“You gave us quite a scare,” Noah said.
“I gave you a scare?” Again, an eyebrow hoisted. “Let me tell you about scary, Noah. Scary is when you’re afraid your life might be determined by whether or not those asshole Manhattan drivers will get out of the way to let your ambulance up Third Avenue. That is scary.”
Noah laughed. His father had been guilty of many things over the years—bad parent, worse husband—but his sense of humor always bought him forgiveness.
“And anyway,” Max continued, “with a little luck I’ll be out of here in a few days.”
“You should get out of here. This hospital cramps your style.”
In truth, he thought his father didn’t look so bad for a man who had just suffered a heart attack and might undergo surgery. A bit pale and drawn, but that was understandable. Looking at him, Noah felt reassured that he would be around, making him crazy, for another couple of decades.
Max leaned toward Noah. “So tell me how the book is going.”
“It’s not.” Noah let out a long sigh. “No one wants to talk. Not on the record. And when they do talk, it’s…it’s sad. Self-loathing justifications for why they won’t come out, why they’d rather enable the enemy than—”
“Stop right there.” Max punctuated his command with a sweeping hand-gesture. “Who is the enemy?”
“Anti-gay politicians. The ones they usually work for.”
Despite his recent heart attack, the argumentative lawyer in Max began to take over.
“Define ‘anti-gay.’”
Max was good, but—on this topic—Noah knew he was better. He began ticking off legislation. “The Federal Marriage Amendment. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ Um…opposition to AIDS funding and information. Equating homosexuality with bestiality and pedophilia…Do I have to go on?”
“You have some good examples, Noah. And I’m not arguing with you. But is everyone who supports ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ anti-gay?”
“Yes.”
“Bill Clinton was anti-gay?”
“That was different. He was forced—”
“Yes!” Max rose from his prone position, and Noah could almost see him in a suit and tie, gesturing to hold the attention of the jury, instead of lying in a pale blue hospital gown under an industrial-grade sheet. “Yes, Clinton was forced. But he did it. He conceded. And in the process he both lost a battle and a war.”
“If he didn’t, it would have been worse.”
“I’m not arguing with you against Clinton. Come on; you know that I’m friends with Bill and Hillary. Love them! All I’m saying is that you might want to remember that in politics, as in life, the palette has very little black and white, but a lot of shades of gray.”
“The world doesn’t look like that to me.”
He sighed. “You’re young.”
“Thirty-four. Almost thirty-five.”
“Young.” Max grabbed a glass of water from the bedside table, drank, and continued. “Gays are the new Jews. I think you should fight for equality, but I don’t think you should assume that everyone is going to get it, or that it’s going to be easy. Take it from a Jew born in the Holocaust era. To me, it’s insane to think that a lot of people didn’t ‘get it’ about Jews just a few generations ago. It’s better now…not perfect, but better. It will be better for you, too, but you have to realize that a lot of people—even a lot of gay people—are going to have a learning curve.”
Noah shook his head. “It had better be a steep curve. Most of us don’t want to wait, Dad.”
“Ah…” Max closed his eyes and slumped back against the pillow. “The impatience of youth.”
“I’m thirty-four,” Noah reminded him. Again.
“Youth. You will learn.”
Despite the fact that he had