Three-Martini Lunch

We are never the heroes of our own stories, unless we are lying. If we choose to count ourselves among the brave, we write ourselves as the villains we are, hoping for redemption.

There was something in the way he posed a question and followed it up with a generous pause, I think, that drew me out. I had never noticed all the pauses that were missing from most people's conversations.

That's the funny thing about doubt." "What do you mean?" "It makes you feel rotten as hell. But if anyone bothered to think about it, it's a symptom of love. It means it matters to you. It's the brain questioning the wisdom of the heart. It doesn't mean the heart doesn't know better all along, it only means the brain doesn't understand how.

That's the thing about taste: It's rarely shared.

In those days, I straddled more than a handful of worlds, which is also to say I belonged wholly to none.

I had lived and left all the living I'd done in that strange, perfectly sculpted yet empty echo of my life,

It was bizarre the way time was like an accordion, and distinct moments that felt so disparate sometimes folded together with a callous symmetry.

...sometimes editors, we're passionate about certain books... We simply want them to exist, to point to them on a shelf and to tell another person: "Here. Read this." pg 486

Together we drank a couple of fingers of bourbon neat, and then he shook my hand in a dignified way and informed me the best lesson he could teach me at this point in my life was self-reliance.

Between the five of us we finished off a pot of coffee and two packs of cigarettes and fourteen bottles of beer and shared the dim awareness that a small but sturdy union had been formed.

Back in those days My Old Man was king of what they called three-martini lunch. This meant that in dimly lit steak houses all over Manhattan my father made bold, impetuous deals over gin and oysters. That was how it was done. Publishing was a place for men with ferocity and an appetite for life.

I think it must've been because of Bobby that Rusty came around at first. Rusty was a scrawny, rat-faced dandy of a kid who acquired his nickname by virtue of his rust-coloured hair. I mentioned Bobby was beautiful in a way that even guys who went around with girls noticed and Rusty was not the sort to go around with girls at all and so was even more likely to pay his respects to Bobby's beauty.

It was always a smart thing if you were going to a party to invite Bobby, because all the prettiest chicks flocked to Bobby and if you were standing next to him it was like they were flocking to you, too.

The Caravaggio had been one of my favourites; I had taped it to the ceiling over my bed and memorised its shapes and lines, but I had never seen it in colour and hadn't understood all that I was missing. I stared at it with fascination now. It was like seeing a friend you thought you knew and realising there were still a great many secrets you had yet to discover about each other.

Never agree with a man who insults you.

We were inverted images of each other in some ways.

I had the details of that photograph memorised.

But mostly I married her because it made me heartsick to think of her marrying someone else.

It's a myth that people who live in cities are naturally more open-minded, more accepting and tolerant of difference. The truth is, whatever people are, be it saints or bigots, they simply are these things, and the city - by smashing all those different kinds of people up against one another - just makes people's tolerance (or lack of it) all that much more pronounced.

It dawned on me that no person is as poetically homesick as someone who has come to New York for the first time and glimpsed a small vestige of her home state.