Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still? In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much

I lit a cigarette and then I threw the match over my shoulder for good luck thinking: Doesn’t New York just turn you inside out.

For wasn’t it just a matter of time before we crossed each other’s path? Despite all the hoopla, wasn’t Manhattan just ten miles long and a mile or two wide?

On Friday, the 23rd of December, I was sitting at my kitchen table cutting slices from a ten-pound ham and drinking bourbon from a bottle.

From the end of the pier he could see the city’s skyline in its entirety—the whole staggered assembly of townhouses and warehouses and skyscrapers stretching from Washington Heights to the Battery. Nearly every light in every window in every building seemed to be shimmering and tenuous—as if powered by the animal spirits within—by the arguments and

As we sat there, dusk was falling and the lights of the city were coming on one by one in ways that even Edison hadn’t imagined. They came on across the great patchwork of office buildings and along the cables of the bridges; then it was the street lamps and the theater marquees, the headlights of the cars and the beacons perched atop the radio

Could there have been a more contrary statue to place across from one of the largest cathedrals in America? Atlas, who attempted to overthrow the gods on Olympus and was thus condemned to shoulder the celestial spheres for all eternity—the very personification of hubris and brute endurance. While back in the shadows of St. Patrick’s was the

I poured myself a gin that was sized to make my apartment seem less depressing and sat in my father’s easy chair.

And as the night was unseasonably warm, we took our little picnic onto his fifty-square-foot terrace overlooking Eighty-third Street and entertained ourselves with a pair of binoculars. Directly across the street on the twentieth floor of No. 42 East Eighty-third