New York - The Novel

effort of that day had taken a lot out of him.
    “I found the guy with the red baseball hat,” Gorham said quickly, and he disgorged the contents of his pocket. He grinned. “I nearly got arrested.”
    It took Charlie a few moments to summon his energy. But when he did, he looked up at Gorham with a gratitude that was touching.
    “You did that for me?”
    “Yes,” said Gorham. And kissed him.

After Dark
1977
    B Y THE EVENING of Wednesday, July 13, the atmosphere, which had been hot and humid all day, was getting oppressively close. It felt as if a thunderstorm could break. Apart from this circumstance, Gorham had no other expectations for the evening ahead—except the pleasure of seeing his good friend Juan, of course.
    Gorham had armed himself with a large umbrella as he walked swiftly northward from his apartment on Park. He only saw Juan every six months or so, but it was always an interesting occasion. Opposites in every way, they’d been friends since they were at Columbia together. And although Gorham took pride in the fact that he had a large network of friends from every walk of life, he’d always felt that Juan was special. “I’m sorry that my father isn’t here,” he’d told Juan once. “He would have liked you.” This, from Gorham, was high praise.
    By the year 1977, Gorham Master could reasonably claim that, so far at least, his life had gone according to plan. After his father’s death, he’d let the Park Avenue apartment during the rest of his time at Harvard, staying at his mother’s Staten Island house when he visited the city. He’d been fortunate to get a low number in the lottery and avoided the draft. Then he’d managed to impress Columbia Business School so much that they took him into the MBA program without previous work experience. Gorham didn’t want to hang around; he wanted to get started. Columbia had been a wonderful experience, all the same. The business school had provided him with a sound intellectual framework for organizing the restof his life, and a number of interesting friends as well, including Juan Campos. Emerging with his MBA, he’d found himself, still in his early twenties, in the enviable position of being the owner of a six-room apartment on Park Avenue, without a mortgage, and with enough cash to pay the maintenance for years to come—all this before he started his first job.
    This might not be riches by the standards of his class, but if he had been a different character, the possession of so much money at the start of his life might have destroyed Gorham, by taking away his incentive to work. Luckily for him, however, he had such a strong ambition to restore his family to its former status in the city that, in his mind, it represented only the accomplishment of the first step—namely, that the present representative of the family should be seen to start his career from a position of privilege. The next step was to get a job in a major bank. After that, he intended to do whatever it took to get to the top. His father might not have been a conventional success, but Gorham was going to be. That was his mission.
    But he missed Charlie, even more than he’d thought he would.
    Charlie had died too soon; the very year of his death seemed to proclaim the fact. With all its tragedy, 1968 had been an extraordinary year. There had been the failure of the Tet Offensive, and the huge demonstrations in New York against the Vietnam War. April had seen the terrible assassination of Martin Luther King, and June of Robert Kennedy. There had been the memorable candidacies of Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace for the presidency. In Europe, the student revolution in Paris, and the Russian crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia had changed the history of the Western world. Andy Warhol had been shot and wounded, Jackie Kennedy had married Aristotle Onassis. So many iconic events in modern history had taken place that year, and Charlie Master had not been there to witness and comment upon them. It seemed so unnatural, so wrong.
    Yet in some ways, Gorham was almost glad that his father had not lived to see the last few years. For that depressing garbage strike at the start of ’68 had not been the culmination, but only the beginning of New York’s troubles. Year after year the great city his father loved had deteriorated. Huge efforts had been made to market New York to the world as an exciting place. Taking a little-known slang term for a