she says. "My mom. She texts me all day, with potential SAT words. She says if I don't get a head start I'll wind up at B.U., or Bowdoin, or something. And then she'd have to jump from the roof of our building."
"What's the word?"
"Gnostic. G-n-o-s-t-i-c. The g is probably silent?"
We pass the word back and forth, like a puppy you're trying to socialize, when something happens that makes no sense. I have a boner, in the street, while trying to define an SAT word with Shannon. How could that be possible?
"I have to go," she says, as if she senses it, as if she's as alarmed by the boner as I am.
"Me, too. Sorry you lost."
"Oh, well," she says, as she walks away, "tell Theo to bring us together."
When I get to Grand Central I remember something George once said, that every person moving through it has one secret they believe they could never tell. I stand there for a moment, right in the middle of it, and wonder: What would my secret be? Is it something you know, or a thing you discover, but that's been there all along, waiting? And say you never discover it; what then? I worry about these things. I'll ask George; he's the one who brought it all up in the first place.
I hit the street and walk the few blocks west, and I'm glad I do, for just as I get near the theater district it seems all the lights go on. As I head up Eighth Avenue I hear someone say, " Young man?" and I turn to see, unfortunately, a large clown; he holds out tickets to me, which happens at least nineteen times a block around here. All I want is to get home so I can talk to my dad and George as Theo has asked, but I try to be polite to the clown, as he probably has a family and would prefer to be playing Tom in The Glass Menagerie or Tom in The Grapes of Wrath (which I happen to be reading in school), parts George says were his favorites in what he calls the Time of the Toms, when he was an actor, long ago.
"What's it for?" I ask, pretending to be interested.
"The circus!" he says, much too loudly. " Bring your kids!"
"I don't have any," I say. "I'm sixteen." And it's at this point, with a typical ticket giver, that I'd take the ticket and move on, but I can see that this guy is falling apart in front of me. He takes off his wig, and red nose, and tells me he went to Juilliard, where he studied commedia dell'arte, whatever that is. He never thought he'd wind up as a clown, handing out tickets to a circus where the animals are abused and the midgets hunch down to seem smaller. To top it off, he's HIV-positive, a condition I learn is rampant in the clown world.
"That sucks," I say.
"Have safe sex," he tells me.
"I do. Or, in the interest of clarity— I hope to."
He asks if I have a minute, and I nod; I'm not sure why. He tells me he saw the Towers fall and that nothing's been the same, really, since. I'm not sure I believe him, but I have a motto that if someone tells you they saw the Towers fall, then they saw the Towers fall, and that's how it is. Period.
"So that's my minute, I guess," he says.
"You can have another."
"No," he says, putting his nose back on. "This is New York, right? We're all so close. You have to breach boundaries and respect them at the same time. Do you know what I mean?"
"I'd like to think about it," I say, "but I think so." This happens all the time in New York, people on the street saying what New York is, like it was a daily tax you paid to earn your right to be here; I hope when the time comes for me to do that, I can come up with something to say. "And thanks for the tickets." He presses a few more into my hand, and then starts following someone else.
So I turn west on Forty-Sixth, and there it is, Ecco, halfway down the block, five steps down from the street and across from one of the boardinghouses where, some people think, John Wilkes Booth planned the assassination of Lincoln. Even though it's early, people are going into the restaurant, which I'm sure pleases George; people haven't been spending in the theater district since the recession started, and he feels this is sad as in times like these a show and some correctly fried calamari is just what people need. As I come in I see Wally at the bar, George talking to Armando in the kitchen, and Lenny, George's best friend, who owns and runs the restaurant with him, setting out pumpkins and maize.
"Hey, kid," he says when he sees me, "how's the meth lab coming?"
Lenny thinks, given my age, that I must yearn for wry and daring comments from adults, so he's got a few stored up for every time I see him. Lenny's gay, of course, but in a different way than George. Actually the issue, for me, is more about funniness than gayness; Lenny says funny stuff so you'll think, "Wow, Lenny's funny," whereas George does because that's where he is at the moment, and you can choose to be with him there or not. He sees me as he comes from the kitchen and waves, heartily, like he's meeting an ocean liner; it's my second big wave in an hour. I wave back and watch as he goes to greet this lady, Mrs. Engler, who comes in just about every day. She's always alone, and always has the osso bucco, which we're pretty well known for as it's always unusually good. And even though she always has it, she still always asks if it's good today and if it's tender. He says, "Yes," then she says, "Well, I'll trust you this once," as if she hadn't a thousand times before. George says people come to a place like Ecco not for the food but because they trust the guy who runs it, that he'll take care of them and understand, even if they don't, what they need.
He gestures for me to join them. I want to get to Theo's questions, of course, but George must want me for a reason. Diner Relations, I'd guess. We have a deal; I make a little money helping in the kitchen— chopping herbs, crisscrossing rosemary sprigs in dishes of oil, torching the tops of crème brulées for that well-known crackly effect— and George lets me in on aspects of the business, like his trust thing; he feels I have a future in food if I want one. I just need to let him know. And I've never actually met Mrs. Engler before; I've only heard the stories. George has lots, and somehow they're mostly good.
"Hey," George says.
And for some reason I start to speak with an English accent. I don't know why; sometimes I think I'm like forty different people, sometimes not quite one. "Hello, George," I say, then, turning to Mrs. Engler, "Madam."
The English thing seems to really turn her on. "Are you visiting us from England, young man?" she asks.
"This is Nigel," George tells her. "He's my nephew. My sister Victoria married a baronet."
George doesn't have a sister Victoria, nor am I his nephew. But that's our secret. "I hail from London," I say. "In England."
"I adore London," Mrs. Engler says. She beams, chuckles, then cocks her head, like Frances, our dead border terrier, would always do whenever you said the word peanut. "What was it Dr. Johnson said?" This isn't a real question; there are adults— sadly, often my own mom— who ask questions they know the answer to, usually revolving around a quote from some dead witty English guy or Mark Twain. "If you're tired of London, you're tired of life."
"One must agree," I say. "N' est-ce pas?"
She is now officially beside herself with joy. "Well, clearly you've lived in France! Now, tell me, Nigel. Have you tried the osso bucco?"
I take it a step further. I'm still English, but now I'm practicing my American accent. "It's awesome," I say.
We all laugh, enjoying me. "Well," Mrs. Engler says, "I'll trust you both. Just this once! And while you're here, dear, make sure not to miss the Frick." Her salad comes; she sighs, as people do here when food is set in front of them, and starts to eat. George walks me to the bar, nods to Wally, then nudges me, which is my cue to demonstrate something else he's teaching me, the hand gestures, secret restaurant code. I raise a thumb: ginger ale. Snap my fingers: potato chips. The snap used to mean nuts, but we've had to cut corners; everyone has. Wally sets out my stuff.
"So how was school?" George says.
"Thrilling," I say, "when it wasn't enriching. Donald Rumsfeld came and read to us from The Red Pony.