Beautiful Lies

beard and a potbelly, checkered shirt under suspenders, orthopedic shoes, and an endearing waddle, he always disappointed me with a thick Long Island accent. He should have been Scottish. He should have called me “lass.”

“Let’s reschedule,” she said officiously, as if she didn’t buy it but couldn’t care less.

With that I was free. Freedom, I’d have to say, is probably the most important thing to me, more important than youth, beauty, fame, money. I wouldn’t say more important than love. But some people who know me well have claimed that it’s at least a toss-up deep inside me. One of those people was Zachary.

“Breakfast at Bubby’s?” I said when he answered. There was a pause where I heard him turn over in bed. A few months ago, I might have been beside him.

“Don’t you have a job?” he asked.

“I’m between assignments at the moment,” I said with mock indignation. It was true; I was between freelance assignments. But it wasn’t an issue for a number of reasons.

“What time?” he said, and in his voice I heard the sad mingling of hope and regret that I often heard when we spoke.

“Give me an hour?”

“Okay, see you then.”

Zachary was the man I should have married, the one I was supposed to marry. Our lives have been intertwined since we were children. My parents loved him, maybe more than they did my own brother. My friends loved him, his sandy blond hair and bright eyes, his fit, athletic body, his successful private pediatric practice, the way he treated me. Even I really liked him. But when it came down to decision time, I balked. Why? Fear of commitment? A lot of people believe that about me. But I don’t think so. All I can say is, forever and Zachary just didn’t seem compatible. There was nothing that I could point my finger at precisely. We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Dazs French Vanilla ice cream, among other things. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn’t it? In the end, I cared about him so much that I just thought he deserved someone who loved him more than I did. If that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, you’re not alone. My parents and Zack’s mother, Esme (whom I sometimes felt closer to than my own), were still floored by my decision. Since we were children they’d harbored a (not so) secret fantasy that Zack and I would be together. So when we started dating, they were nothing short of jubilant. And when we split, I think they had a harder time with it than Zack and I did.

That morning, Zack and I were trying to be friends. I’d ended our relationship a little over six months earlier and we were struggling past his disappointment and injured feelings (and pride, I thought) toward what I hoped would be an enduring friendship. It was awkward but hopeful.

I rolled from my bed and pushed it back against the wall. Remember how I said the building sags? Well, there’s literally a dip in the floor of my bedroom. Since my bed is on casters, I occasionally wake up, particularly after a restless night, to find that it has rolled into the middle of the room. It’s a small inconvenience. Some might even call it an endearing quirk of East Village living.

I ran the water in the shower and closed the door to steam up my narrow black-and-white-tiled bathroom. Listening to the sound of the rain, I padded into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. I zoned out, still not quite awake, as the espresso maker hissed, sending the smell of Cafe Bustelo into the air. I could hear the street noise from First Avenue in the distance and smell the pastries baking in Veniero’s, the bakery behind my building whose venting system released its aromas into the courtyard. I looked across the courtyard: The cute guitar player still had his shades drawn; the gay couple were dressed for work and sitting at their kitchen table with large black cups of coffee, the blond reading The Village Voice and his dark-haired lover The Wall Street Journal; the young Asian girl was doing her morning yoga stretches while her roommate seemed to be reading aloud from a script in the next room. Because of the cool temperature, all the windows were closed and all of these lives played out before me like muted television screens. They were all accessories to my morning, just as I would be to them if they happened to look out their windows and see me waiting for my coffee to espress.

Like I said, I was between assignments. I had just finished a profile on Rudy Giuliani for New York magazine for which I had been paid quite nicely. I had a couple of other irons in the fire, articles I’d pitched to editors who knew me at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. As someone who had been working regularly for nearly seven years, I was confident that one of those ideas would turn into an assignment, though later, I hoped, rather than sooner. I was comfortable that way. At first, the freelance writing gig had been a bit of a struggle. If my parents hadn’t subsidized my meager income when I graduated from college, I probably would have had to move back home with them. But as I have a modicum of talent, am a professional who meets deadlines, and am a writer without much of an ego who takes editing well, I made a reputation and some good contacts and the rest is just a lot of hard work.

Even with that, I might not be as comfortable if my uncle Max hadn’t died nearly two years ago. Max was an uncle who wasn’t actually an uncle, but really my father’s best friend from Detroit, where they had been boys together. Both sons of autoworkers, my father and Max lived in the same suburb for eighteen years. While my father came from a solid home, my grandparents hardworking blue-collar people, Max’s father was an alcoholic and a physically abusive man. One night when Max was sixteen, his father’s violence turned deadly. Max’s father beat his mother into a coma from which she never awoke. Rather than let him become a ward of the state, my grandparents took Max in and somehow managed to help both him and my father through college.

My father went on to medical school and later became the pediatrician that he is to this day. Max went into real estate and became one of the biggest developers on the East Coast. He never stopped trying to pay back my father and my grandparents. Because my grandparents flat out refused a cash payback, he lavished them and us with Caribbean cruises and outrageous birthday gifts, from bicycles to new cars. Naturally, we adored him. He never married and, without children, treated my brother, Ace, and me like we were his own.

Everyone always thought of him as a happy man, rarely seen without a smile on his face, always ready with a belly laugh. But even as a child, I remember sensing a deep sadness in him. I remember looking into his blue eyes and seeing grief edging his lashes, pulling down at the corner of his mouth. I remember how he’d glaze over, lost in thought, when he thought no one was looking. And I remember the way he always looked at my mother, Grace, as if she were a glittering prize that had been awarded to someone else.

Uncle Max was an alcoholic, but because he was a happy drunk, no one seemed to mind. The Christmas Eve before last, after leaving my parents’ house, where we’d all spent the evening together, he never returned to his home. He’d apparently stopped off at a bar after leaving us, then several hours later got into his black Mercedes sedan and proceeded to drive off a bridge and into the frigid water below. By accident or design, we’ll never know, though a lack of skid marks indicated that there was no last-second slamming of the brakes. It was icy that night. That might have been it, the rubber of the tires unable to find purchase on the slick road. Or perhaps he passed out at the wheel, never saw it coming. We prefer to think of it as an accident, since the alternative would haunt us all.

As a family, we were bereft, but my father most of all; he’d lost the person with whom he’d shared most of his life. It still didn’t feel quite right to celebrate Christmas Eve, a night we’d always shared with Max and the night we lost him.

In his will, he’d left most of his money to my parents, and to the Maxwell Allen Smiley Foundation. He’d created this foundation long before I was born, and it existed to fund myriad charities that offered assistance and shelter to battered women and abused children. But he also left a large sum of money to me and my brother, Ace. With the help of an accountant, my share of the money had been solidly invested. As a result, I had the freedom I so cherished. My brother, on the other hand, injected that money into his veins. Or so I assumed. But that’s something else.

I wasn’t thinking about any of this that morning. I was just looking forward to a day that I owned, where I could do anything I wanted. I showered, blew-dry my hair, pulled on my four-year-old Levi’s, as faded and soft as memory, a bright red Tommy Hil-figer sweatshirt, Nikes, and a Yankees cap, and headed out the door. If I had known, I would have paused at the door to say good-bye to a perfectly lovely existence, an enviably simple, comfortable, happy life. Not perfect, of course. But pretty close, comparatively speaking.

In the hallway I tried to be as quiet as possible. I strongly suspected Victoria, my elderly neighbor, of waiting by her door to hear when I entered and left my apartment. The knowledge of this caused me to come and go