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ChApTer One
Falling Apart
If you’d like to be loved, then love.
—Sex and the Single Girl
I’m not supposed to be here.I don’t mean “here”—standing in an unmoving line in themiddle o Madison Square Park waiting or a cheeseburger Idon’t want on a hot June day.I mean that I’m not supposed to be the 30-something withtwo cats, one toolset I don’t know how to use, and zero prospectson the horizon.I’m not.And yet I am.How in God’s name has it taken me so long to see this?
H
ey,” he said as he sauntered over to where I was on my phonein the corner o a room. We were at a party in an L.A. ware-house and I was checking my voice mail. Thrown by his direct-ness, by the way he walked right up to me even though I wasbusy, and then by how he looked at me—again, so directly—I
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hung up the phone even though I was in the middle o listeningto a message I’d been waiting or. “You look stressed,” he said.He appeared bemused.This guy wasn’t gorgeous; his brown hair was starting togray, his ace was a little pinched, he wore glasses and was nei-ther rugged nor slim. But or some reason, I shook as I smiled athim. “And you look amused by that,” I responded.He laughed—a loud, guttural guaw. “You were very o-cused on what you were doing,” he said. “It made me want tosee i I could break your ocus.” I noticed that stubble decoratedhis cheeks and chin.“Mission accomplished,” I said. Under normal circum-stances, I would have been annoyed—being accosted by astranger doesn’t tend to bring out my good-natured cheer. Butnothing about what was happening elt normal: the air was sud-denly charged with energy rom some otherworldly place.We introduced ourselves. When he told me his name wasWill, I suddenly realized he was the painter my riend hadbeen telling me earlier was going to be at this party. Since myknowledge about art was somewhere between minimal andnonexistent, I’d only hal listened when she’d talked about howhe was a hero o sorts in the art world, credited with creatingsome new medium that enraged purists but was celebrated bymodernists, and how his work sold or millions o dollars. ButI didn’t tell him that I’d just gured out who he was; by thispoint, I was ocused on his eyes, which, now that he’d removedhis glasses and tucked them into the ront pocket o his whitebutton-down shirt, I could see were swimming-pool blue. Theycontained vestiges o pain in the irises but they also looked
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