She flicked my ear. “Little shit.”

  She had given me a copy of Joe Gould’s Secret for my twentieth birthday.

  “What a writer,” I said, mimicking her.

  “But such a disappointing lover.”

  I laughed and sat up to see her face.

  “Did you really sleep with Joseph Mitchell?”

  “Don’t be insolent, young man.”

  4

  Those early years in New York were the happiest of my life. Without having to pay rent, I needed very little. I was not Joseph Mitchell, but I managed to publish enough—about theater, about art, about books, about restaurants—to pay for food and drink and cigarettes and the thick surplus peacoat I believed was fundamental to a respectable life on the Lower East Side. At first, I published nothing more than five hundred words at a time. Then a longer profile of a young Senegalese artist known for using pollen in his paintings. This brought me some attention. Another piece on a socialist art collective squatting in Red Hook brought me a bit more. I came to know journalists and editors, artists and gallerists. I learned to write quickly and competently. I went to good parties. I was a regular at Judy’s, a low-lit bolt-hole with no tables, a long lacquered-oak bar and comfortable stools. I did not want a new watch, or more friends, or true love. I wanted only to write something of consequence, something that might make Lina Klein proud, that might shut my mother up, that—I must admit this fantasy—might return my father to me.

  Three years after I’d moved to New York, on a January Sunday evening at Judy’s, a bull-like man sat down next to me and laid his thick hands on the bar. There were other stools available, but he chose the one to my right and so I glanced at him to get a sense of what might be coming—a rant, a come on, a plea for money, drinks, drugs, a meal—but what came instead was the outright shock of discovering that the man was Ernst Frankel.

  My first instinct was to get up and call my grandmother, who worshipped him, who, before I went to college, often sat us in front of his famous marble sea, its waves so impossibly waterlike, on weekend afternoons at LACMA. She was still there, stuck in a city she didn’t love, with her souring daughter, while I lived this life she’d handed me, a life in which a person can go out for a beer and find himself beside one of the world’s greatest living artists.

  I tried to be very still. I’d read recently in a novel that Americans in French cafés were easy to identify because they were always picking at themselves, while Europeans let their hands rest, doing only the work of raising a cigarette or a glass to their lips. I was a dead-skin-scraper, a nail-biter, a beard-scratcher and, at the time, I found this observation profound, as if I’d finally been slipped the secret to cool.

  “Are you all right?” These were the first words Ernst Frankel spoke to me.

  “Yes, why?”

  “Well, you’ve stopped moving altogether. I was afraid you’d had some sort of event.”

  I hung my head and told him about the novel, which made him laugh, which made me very happy. It was a good laugh—thudding, full of bass and not too loud—and I was proud to have elicited it.

  I was at the end of my beer and so he ordered Scotch for us both, without asking me if it was something I liked to drink. This would turn out always to be the way with him and I didn’t mind at all. In those days, I often had no idea what I wanted until someone showed me.

  “Are you alone?”

  “That’s a difficult question,” I said, trying to be interesting.

  “Is it? For my part, I find it quite simple. I am alone. I am not waiting on anyone, but yes, I suppose, since now we’re here together, neither of us is alone. I apologize. Do you often drink alone?”

  “I like to come here on Sunday nights and have a drink,” I told him. “It’s a ritual I’ve made for myself.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I moved here.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Three years ago.”

  “You live in the neighborhood?”

  “Around the corner.”

  “Alone?”

  “Are you planning to murder me?”

  He smiled. “I admire young people who are happy to be alone.”

  I nodded.

  “But maybe I will murder you. Would you like me to murder you?”

  “I don’t think so, no. Though it might make me famous.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Sure, for fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to be famous for longer than that?”

  “You tell me,” I said, turning my stool so that I could really face him.

  “You want me to tell you what you want?”

  “You’ve been famous for fifty years, Mr. Frankel. Is it something you think I’d like?”

  He smiled at me then. Until that instant, he had been to me one of those people whose faces never quite settle in the mind. Each angle suggesting something new, each photograph presenting a slightly different person. But now, I thought, I knew what he looked like.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Solomon. Sol Fields.”

  “Is it a burden?”

  “I wasn’t entirely named after the king, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Who then?

  “Also after Charlotte.”

  “The painter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Different spelling, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “So your father was for the king, your mother for the artist?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “My mother was for the king, my grandmother for the artist.”

  “Your grandmother?”

  “Maybe you know her.”

  “Why? You think all the old people know one another?”

  “Because she lived around here for a long time and because she moved in your world.”

  “Which world is that?”

  “Art.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Lina Klein. She’s a great fan of yours.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know her. At least, I don’t know her name.”

  “You must know a lot of people.”

  “Tell me about yourself, Solomon. Where did you come from and why are you here?”

  He asked me question after question. About my father, about where I’d grown up, about my mother, the schools I’d attended. My grandmother. It was the first time in my life I knew what it was to be interviewed and how disarming it could be. There are few rarer qualities than a true interest in the lives of others.

  Only by the time we were halfway through our second Scotch, did he ask what I did for a living. “Now,” he said, “I must ask the very most popular question in New York City.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a journalist,” I said. “Trying to be.”

  “Are you writing about famine and war?”

  “No.”

  “Poverty and oppression?”

  “No.”

  “Corruption and deceit? The failure of the American experiment?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “All right, I won’t.”

  “You’re not writing about—” He leaned forward so that his spotty white beard was an inch from my mouth and then he whispered, “Culture.”

  I laughed. “Alas.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Why?”

  “This city is so full of sad, disappointed people. They come to write or paint or play guitar and, as you know, they mostly fail. And the ones who stay, they end up as critics and journalists and teachers. Often all three at once.”

  “You’d rather they leave town for good?”

  “Oh yes. Or, even better, they become bankers and spend their money on art.”

  “But who would tell them what is good and what is not?”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “No.”

  “What do you want to do then?”

  “I want to write about artists,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true, but it sounded good and certain.

  “Write about me then.”

  I stared at my glass.

  “Are you trying to be European again, Sol?”

  “You want me to write about you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t given an interview in ten years.”

  “Fourteen years.”

  “Fourteen years. You’ve never read a word I’ve written.”

  “So, I’ll read a word you’ve written. There’s a guy I know. An editor. I can’t stand him, but I hate him the least. The magazine used to be good. I don’t know anymore. The guy’s relentless. He thinks I’m his ticket. He’s terrified his whale will die of natural causes and he wants to be the one to do the killing. So, I’ll bring you to him. I’ll say only with Solomon Fields will I cooperate. Package deal. Take it or leave it.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because it’ll drive the fucker crazy. Because it’ll drive all those clubby little fuckers crazy. They’ll say, who the fuck is Solomon Fields? And I’ll say this is Solomon fucking Fields! I found him at Judy’s. Behold! Isn’t he magnificent?”

  I tried to laugh, but I was having a hard time breathing.

  He wrote his address on a Judy’s matchbook, which I still have in a coconut shell bowl in my apartment. “Put something you’ve written in my mailbox. If I like it, I’ll meet you back here next Sunday for our little ritual.”

  Then he stood up, pulled on his coat and ushanka and left the bar without offering to pay.

  5

  On the phone the next day, Lina Klein couldn’t stop giggling.

  “What were his forearms like?”

  “It’s January. He was wearing a sweater.”

  “His hands, then.”

  “Big. Strong.”

  She sighed. “Clean? Scarred?”

  “We were at Judy’s. It’s dark in there.”

  “Jesus Christ. Was there paint on them? Plaster? Dust?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Not that you saw. Are you a journalist or not?”

  “It’s a good question.”

  “What are you going to give him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do I need to get on a plane and make sure you don’t fuck this up?”

  “He’s not serious. You realize that, right? There are a thousand better writers.”

  “Solomon. You are in New York exactly for these moments. You are twenty-five years old. These are the days that matter. A door opened, now do whatever you must to get through it. Climb into his bed if you have to, but if you’re going to live in my apartment, you’re forbidden from being a coward.”

  It did indeed drive him crazy, but Frankel’s relentless fucker relented and turned out not to be so bad. I worked harder on that piece than I’d ever worked on anything in my life and eight months after the great man took a stool next to mine, the magazine published my profile.

  My grandmother came to New York and the two of us walked to a newsstand at Tompkins Square Park, so that she could see my name on the cover. “Look at this,” she said, “I love you more than I have ever loved you, which is a lot of loving you.” She bought every copy and took my arm and we began to walk west. “Now tell me, big shot, what was he like in bed?”

  My mother over the phone: “I’m happy for you, Sol, okay, but you spend all this time and energy for what? Who does it help exactly? Writing about a multi-millionaire who turns pieces of rock into other pieces of rock while everywhere people are suffering. I’m sorry, but I don’t see the use of it.”

  “Use!” Lina Klein said, disgusted. “Use! Listen to me. There are three true sins: utilitarianism, snobbery and orthodoxy. Right now, do yourself a favor. Ignore your mother. Pretend she doesn’t exist. Say yes to everything, all right? Just say yes to every fucking thing.”

  I followed her advice. I went everywhere. The world appeared entirely apprehensible, containable, festive and open. I had a name, a career. Magazines were still flush then. I was paid well, and a great many people bought me meals and drinks. Editors and publicists, artists, agents and gallerists.

  And then, six months after the publication of “Ernst Frankel: Shadows of Violence, Shadows of Stone” (title not mine) I won an award of some prestige. There were more parties, more dinners.

  Frankel and I were photographed together in his studio, his heavy arm around my shoulder.

  And then, a week after that image was published in our nation’s paper of record, I received an invitation.

  Josef Capo of Pale Advertising wore a black suit of obvious quality, and his hair snipped within an inch of his scalp. There was a military aspect about him, due in part to the haircut and the sharpness of his clothes, but also to his upright posture, his broad shoulders and rawboned face.

  He told me that he was impressed by my writing, that he was looking for creatives, that Pale Advertising was the largest, most successful advertising agency in the world.

  “Are you interested, Mr. Fields, in the world of advertising?”

  Even before I’d reached puberty, my mother had been railing and raging against what she described as one of “capitalism’s most despicable children.” I was forbidden from watching television. Every billboard we passed was an opportunity for a lecture.

  “No,” I said. “I’m really not.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I was raised by a Marxist.”

  He laughed. “Well, if ever you change your mind, the money is very good and you’d be welcome to give it all to the proletariat.”

  The obvious thing was to ask just how good the money was, but I didn’t want to know. My mother never let me forget how hard she worked to support us, to pay off my father’s debts, how close we were to being homeless, how corrupt the systems were, how imbalanced, how broken, how violent. As a result, I was always aware of how much money I did not have, how fleeting fortune could be, and exactly how precarious was my station in life.

  So before he could write a number on a piece of paper and slide it across his lustrous desk, I thanked him and walked out of there with all the arrogance of someone who had yet to disappoint himself.

  “Good for you, Soli, way to stick to your guns,” Lina Klein said.

  But then all of a sudden (or so it seemed to me then) we were in a recession. The money began to disappear, and my pursuers were less avid, less profligate. Except Josef Capo, who, with characteristically excellent timing, sent me a letter with an offer I could not refuse.

  “Would not, Solomon,” Lina Klein said, black ice in her voice. The number did not move her.

  “What do you need money for? You pay no rent. Do you know how many artists would kill for what you have? So many have done with so much less.”

  “We’re in a recession,” I told her. “I have to think about the future. I have to make money.”

  “You sound like someone’s grandfather and you’re making a terrible mistake,” she said and hung up the phone.

  My mother was no more forgiving. “You could be a journalist and write about Israel at least. You could go to Israel and be a journalist. Or join the IDF. Or do anything other than sell toothpaste.”

  I don’t know where she got it that I was going to be writing toothpaste campaigns, but for years it was the same refrain. To her mind, there was no better metaphor for the frivolity of our miserable nation than the oral care aisle at her local Safeway.

  6

  My first months at Pale Advertising were marked most notably by my having created the Go Anywhere, Be Anything campaign for an airline owned by a bald billionaire named Lucien Vega who claimed to have abandoned all material attachments. Aside from the rejection of desire, he was now convinced that the key to enlightenment was flight, which is to say, the key to selling tickets was the promise of enlightenment. It came to him in a dream.

  Vega spent a week at Pale HQ interviewing the greatest minds the company had to offer, but no one, not even the celebrated car guy or the legendary orange juice woman could woo him. Then at the end of a long week of mind-murdering meetings, his famous blue eyes found me at the back of the great conference hall. I was the only one there who hadn’t spoken. He rolled his chair down to my end of the table.

  He said, “Nirvana by aircraft.”

  I nodded.

  He said, “You understand.”

  I did not.

  He peered into my eyes the way the soulless pretend to be soulful and said, “We will provide everything to our first-class passengers so that there will be nothing left to desire. For the duration of a flight, they should come to understand what I understand always. Wanting is foolish. Desire is deadly. I am happy because I no longer want.”

  It took some restraint not to slap him.

  He said, “Give me your line.”

  All week long our very best had been lobbing slogans at him and he’d been batting them back with disgust. There was a palpable fear in the office that he would jump ship and take his billions as he went.

  “Go anywhere, be anything,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. Then he was out the door and I never saw him again.

  A few hours later the celebrated car guy found me at my desk.

  “We’re going with yours,” he said, none too pleased.

  The campaign was an enormous success. My star rose rapidly.

  Those years at Pale changed me in many ways. First, they made me richer than anyone in my family had been since Hitler rose to power. Second, they changed my relationship to language. I was trained at the Pale black ops boot camp to write in alliterative sentences, ever seeking the clever and the wry. I learned to communicate in the flat language of conformity and commerce, of self-actualization and self-esteem. A language that descended precipitously from Esalen to advertising to journalism to politics, pooling and cooling in the common American lexicon, where it rests now, stagnant and stinking.