a hustler.”
The man frowned. “Too bad he left. I wouldn’t have minded getting a piece of that.”
Paolo playfully swatted at the regular with his bar rag and said, “Yes, why should you be any different from everybody else?”
Chapter 1
I never set out to become an actor. It was something I fell into. I suppose that’s understandable, since I grew up pretending.
The pretense began when I was just a child. My parents were on the lower end of the lower-middle class, but they made it clear that we were supposed to project a “certain image” to the good families of Pittsburgh. They were to think my father was hard working (he did most of his work on the edge of a stool in the corner tavern); they were to think that my brother and I were well mannered (we were hellions); and they were to think that our family was “comfortable,” even though my parents were constantly hounded by bill collectors.
But we all acted, and the good families of Pittsburgh believed that we really were who we wanted them to think.
We were good actors. So good that sometimes we forgot that we were just playing roles…
Two hours into his semi-drunken nap on the couch his phone rang. Noah glanced at the clock on the VCR; it was almost midnight. The movie he had been watching was long over, and now Freddy Krueger was menacing a teenage girl on the television screen.
He toyed with the idea of not answering, but then curiosity got the better of him. Maybe, he thought, it was an interviewee, suddenly infused with gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered/two-spirited/ questioning/whatever-else-had-been-added-that-week pride, who wanted to speak on the record. The sudden thought of an openly gay homosexual in Washington filled Noah with hope.
But when he answered the phone, it was his stepmother’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Noah?”
“Tricia!” He was surprised to hear her voice, especially at that late hour. He had no problems with her—they had always gotten along just fine—but she was married to his father, which made her phone calls a bit suspect. That and the fact that, at thirty-eight, she was just four years older than Noah. The thought that if he were straight she would be dating material had always creeped him out a little bit.
“Did I wake you?” she asked.
“No,” he lied, picking up the remote and muting the teenager’s screams.
Tricia got right down to business. “It’s your father, Noah. I’m afraid something has happened.”
“Is he all right?”
“Yes, yes!” she said, a forced cheeriness suddenly in her voice. “I don’t want you to worry, but I wanted you to know.”
“What’s wrong, Tricia?”
“He had a heart attack.”
“He had a…” The words wouldn’t come to him. “Is he okay?”
“He’ll be fine. The doctors say that it wasn’t all that bad.” She paused. “It could have been much worse.” Another pause—with each one, she was growing more honest—and she added, “They may have to do a bypass. We’re still waiting to hear about that. But he’s alert and responsive.”
Another pause.
“And he sends you his love.”
Noah stiffened. If Tricia had never told him that his father sent his love, he probably would have stayed in Washington, trolling bars in the name of research. But in his thirty-four years, he could only remember his father aiming the L word in his direction on four instances: his college graduation, the day his mother finally had the clarity of vision to leave his father, the night Noah cried when his first lover walked out, and one night when they sat all night at the kitchen table as Max poured his heart out when his second divorce became final. There was a fifth time, too, Noah suddenly remembered, but Max had only said the L word because Noah asked him point-blank, so he discounted it because he had forced the issue.
Noah knew that his father loved him. He showed it in a variety of ways. But where the words were concerned, he failed the verbal, but aced the math. The Abrahams were like a family of starchy WASPs, except that they were starchy Jews instead. Not Tricia, of course. Tricias were by definition not Jewish. But the rest of them were starchy Jews…although about as devout as your average Upper East Side Episcopalians.
So, Noah thought, if his father—the Episcopalian Jew; the Jew from Ordinary People—told Tricia to tell him he loved him, there was a problem.
“Noah?”
“I’m here. Now. But I’m leaving for New York”—he glanced at his watch; it was too late to do anything that evening—“in the morning. First train.”
“That’s not necessary. He’s fine.”
“He’s not ‘fine,’” Noah said evenly. “I need to be home.”
“But your book…”
“It can wait.”
“Really, Noah, it’s—”
“I’ll call you from the train,” he said. “And please call me if anything changes overnight.”
She surrendered. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“One more thing,” Noah said, feeling incredibly brave. “Next time you see him, tell him I love him.”
“All right.” She paused yet again. “All right. I will.”
After he hung up, Noah wondered if she paused because she knew that he wasn’t all that good about using the L word himself. And he wondered if she knew he was scared. And, Noah being Noah, he wondered if she’d even bother to give his father the message.
The night passed without the tragic phone call Noah half expected, although he slept fitfully through a string of unsettling, if unremembered, dreams.
By 6:10 AM, he was at Washington’s Union Station. He purchased his Amtrak ticket, grabbed a cup of coffee, stopped at a newsstand to pick up a copy of The Washington Post and—since it arrived at the last minute—The New York Times, and boarded the 6:30 bound for New York City before he had a chance to sit down.
He gave up on the newspapers before the train reached Baltimore. His mind was somewhere else. After a while, he took out the notes for The Project and tried to make sense of them.
But they were making no sense. The only consistent theme was evasiveness, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to glean insight from dozens of interviews when the subjects were going out of their way to say as close to nothing as possible.
I am not a quitter, he told himself once again, to which—after a moment of reconsideration—he appended, But I’m getting pretty damn pessimistic.
His most recent pessimistic moment, the one leading to the upended wastepaper basket the previous evening, had come as a result of his most recent interview. Earlier in the day, in response to an ad he had run in the Washington Blade, a press aide to a United States senator from Ohio had agreed to meet him at a tiny, not-very-popular bistro in Georgetown. The aide—Noah agreed to refer to him as “G. C.,” which were not his real initials—was nervous bordering on paranoid through their brief meeting, and only agreed to be taped after Noah assured him the tape would, eventually, be destroyed.
Later, back at home in his third-floor walk-up apartment on P Street that almost overlooked Dupont Circle, if you stretched out the window and leaned to the right, Noah listened to that tape. And he didn’t like what he heard. He had hoped that his immediate memory of the interview had been wrong, and that—once he listened to the tape—he would discover that G. C. had provided some useful information. But his memory was, regrettably, perfect.