Page 38 of Saltwater

They were at his house, in a second-floor living room that overlooked Turtle Bay Gardens in Midtown Manhattan. A stretch of townhomes occupied by creatives with money, where all the kilims were threadbare because they were antique.

“And his family is loaded,” her friend whispered.

“So he’s a real writer.” Sarah laughed.

“You should meet him.”

The friend had brought her to the party. Saying it was anew literary salonand thatthe host knows everyone,though the invitation list wasextremely limited.Sarah had almost declined, but then, she made it a rule to go to strange parties, if only to squirrel away particularly egregious pieces of dialogue or imitations of character. It was her favorite part of the job—the petty theft of humanity.

And although she was in his living room, drinking his cocktails and eating his canapés, Sarah didn’tneedRichard Lingate. She had started by winning the O’Neill and getting a few pieces produced off-Broadway. Then had moved on to a Whiting, a Guggenheim, and a short stint at Lincoln Center. She was established. She wasn’t looking for a patron. But that evening she watched him finesse each group, she saw how he connected people who might be of use to one another, she witnessed him holding court. It was impressive, the way he knew just which words would flatter.

Richard Lingate, she learned from others—not from him, never from him—had a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton and had worked briefly as an assistant editor at a major publishing house before realizing he could make a larger artistic impact here, in the living room of his apartment, than he could there.And,someone whispered to her,he liked to keep his own hours,which apparently were not aligned with what a normal job required. He was the closest thing to an artistic aristocrat she had ever encountered, and the old-worldness of it delighted her.

Richard Lingate was an anachronism. A welcome one.

“I’m Richard, by the way,” he said, finally cornering her by a bookcase as people were beginning to filter out. Sarah’s fingers were itching for a pen or pencil to record everything she had seen. She felt desperate that this might be her only glimpse of Richard Lingate’s perfectly shabby living room, of his lightly worn-in loafers.

“Sarah,” she said, and extended her hand.

“Someone here told me you’re a writer.”

“A playwright.”

He held up both of his hands. “A playwright. Excuse me. Well”—he took her hand and bent over it, the gesture so mannered and yet so at home in the brownstone—“it is theoldestart form.” And then he walked across the room and began to plunk out Peter Allen’s “Everything Old Is New Again” on the piano, smiling at her in between nodding at his guests as they left.

He was, she thought fleetingly, the perfect subject for a satire. But then, she liked him. Everyone did. Sarah never did find out how hegot her address, but he sent a note the following week, thick cream card stock on which he had written an invitation to dinner.

In retrospect, she should have seen the real Richard sooner. She might have seen the way the books were arranged, always in alphabetical order. She might have noticed the way he was unilateral in the advice he offered his guests. She might have been more alarmed by the way he snapped at the maid, his voice cold, shot through with condescension, when she brought them lukewarm coffee, the wrong sugar cubes.Do you need me to write it down for you? Would that help you remember? Memory is a muscle, you know.

But at the time it had all struck her as eccentric. Artistic. A little esoteric.

All things Sarah aspired to be.

With Richard, New York transformed into a fever dream of dinners and frothy conversation, of shoulder straps slumping down arms in the summer heat, of cigarettes furtively smoked on fire escapes. Richard, it seemed, was as hungry as Sarah, and together they ate the city. There wasn’t a performance or exhibition or reading they missed. There wasn’t a day they didn’t talk about words or art or what to see next.

Richard was erudite and funny and that particular brand of uptown with downtown swagger that Sarah had never been able to resist. They were in love. And like all love, theirs was going to last forever. After six months, they were married at city hall. Sarah never even met his family. She signed a prenup without reading it; she would have signed anything. It was that early flush, when the money didn’t matter because everything was so easy. Only later would she realize it was so easybecauseof the money.

Until one night, a year into their marriage, Richard said: “My father is sick.”

Sarah stood and made her way across their living room—because by then itwastheirs—and sat on the arm of the chair next to her husband. She ran her fingers through his hair. “Baby, no,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head.

“My brother thinks I need to come home. That this might be it. Impossible, but I always thought he would live forever. I think he did, too.”

Sarah had asked, once, about Richard’s brother.

“He’ll run things one day,” Richard had said. “My father made it clear when we were young that he thought I was weaker. Because of my size. My brother is bigger than me. In every way—taller, broader. I was never as good as Marcus at sports, at math. Never as good at fighting, either. It was exhausting, the way he set us against each other. Over everything.”

Sarah could see a younger version of her husband, easily wounded and fragile. He had that temperament—he could be tender, but also petulant. It was what made him such a great reader and viewer—his sensitivity. The thousand miles New York had put between him and his family had helped him realize he wasn’t that boy anymore. Wasn’t the younger, softer brother. She was grateful for the distance.

But now he needed to go back.

“Will you come with me?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said.

She didn’t know it then, but they wouldn’t return to Manhattan.

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