I become aware of an acute discomfort in Noah. He’s stuck in the doorway and doesn’t seem to know what to do.
“There’s a hook behind you for your coat,” I say, and then we fumble over who will hang it up.
“Espresso?” I say. I’m eager to leave the hallway and make it to my slightly more spacious kitchen. “I’m fresh out of two-percent milk, but I have whole, or almond, or . . . oatmeal, I think.” I glance at him. “That was a joke? Terry mentioned some issue with two-percent, oh never mind . . .”
He’s looking at me blankly.
“I can just make the espresso and—”
“No, thanks,” Noah says. He walks past my kitchen and into the living room. He sinks down on the couch and looks, for a moment, almost normal there. Then he ruins it with a snarky, “It’s not like this is going to take long, is it?”
“You’re in a charming mood,” I call from the kitchen, making myself a stupid espresso because I paid eleven dollars for it at Blue Bottle. Then I hear my words on playback and I wince. “What I mean is, no, I won’t waste your time.”
Espresso in hand, I meet him in the living room. As I reach for my notes, there comes a rustling from underneath the coffee table. Noah jumps about a foot off the couch.
“What was that?” he says.
“I have a tortoise. Alice. It was probably her,” I explain. “Do pets bother you?”
“No. It’s fine. I just ran into some aggressive dogs outside your apartment. Made me jumpy.”
I bite back a laugh. “That must have been scary.”
Noah’s peering under the coffee table as Alice pokes her head out. She appraises him discerningly, in the form of her trademark slow blink. An actual smile lights up his face.
“Hello, Alice,” he says, his voice exuding a friendliness apparently reserved for reptiles.
“It can take her a couple decades to warm up to new people,” I say, but then Alice blows my mind by taking one step and then another in Noah’s direction.
Unfortunately, her advance disrupts the equilibrium of all the crap I’ve shoved under the coffee table. And out slides the framed picture of newly engaged Ryan and me. It clatters to my hardwood floor.
Noah picks up the frame, and I die a slow death watching him study it closely. He glances at me, then at the photo again. At last, he tilts his head to see under the coffee table.
“Is this where you keep all your ex-boyfriends?”
“He is not my ex-boyfriend—”
“Oh, right.” He points at my hand in the photograph. “The ring. Ex-fiancé?”
“Don’t worry about him!” I say and snatch the picture from his hands.
“Sorry,” Noah says. “Occupational hazard.”
I’m angry that he’s seen what I look like when I cry, guilty that I’d shoved Ryan under the coffee table for this asshole. I return the photo to its place on the wall.
Noah watches all of this with great interest, eyebrows annoyingly raised, and by the time I get back to my chair across the couch from him, Alice is sitting in his lap.
“We’ve bonded,” he announces, giving her a pat on the head in the one place she will accept affection.
I rub my temples, trying to focus. “Do you know why I asked you here today?”
“Because I didn’t turn in my homework on Saturday?” he says.
I narrow my eyes at him. “Because I know you don’t have a book.”
“I told you—”
“Yeah, yeah.” I wave him off. “Irons in the fire. Look, what I need is for you to have an actual idea that I can sell to Sue.”
He opens his mouth to argue. I’m not having it.
“To that end,” I continue, “I thought about what you said the other day. About having run out of New York City landmarks for your characters to kiss in front of? And so, I have prepared a list of landmarks you have never written about, and may have never considered.” I hold up my notebook. “You’re going to look at my list. You’re going to cross off the places you’ve been to. Then, one by one, we’re going to visit the places left on the list until you find something worth writing about.”
“Lanie—”
“Talk to the list.” I set it down in front of him.
Fifty overlooked New York City landmarks. They are numbered in order of my personal preference, but all of them are gems. At the top, in an effort to inject a touch of playfulness, I’ve written the header Fifty Ways to Break Up Noah and His Writer’s Block.
“Do you have a pen?” he asks, stone faced and unappreciative of my good humor.
I hand over my pen. Noah crosses something out. I lean forward, watch as he retitles the page: Fifty Ways to Break Up Lanie and Her Anxiety.
“Just some light edits,” he says.
I want to tell him that my anxiety and his writer’s block are not mutually exclusive, that they are, in fact, in every way intertwined. But I hang back, because now he’s actually reading the list.
I’d spent most of Sunday drafting it after my brunch with BD. I had scoured the internet. I had paged through four old diaries. I had texted friends for help jogging my memory about the city’s little wonders that we’ve stumbled upon over the years.
To Rufus: Remind me how we scaled the back of the Pepsi-Cola sign in Gantry Plaza after that BBQ in Astoria?
He’d written back: All I remember is it involved a stolen fire ladder and a whole lot of Tanqueray.
To Meg: Does your mom-friend still live in that romantic little enclave on the UWS? Intel on how a girl might get access to the garden for an hour?
She’d written back: You mean Pomander Walk? That mom and I had a falling-out over gluten allergies. But the bish needs my help planning the school’s spring fundraiser, so lemme see what I can do.
My friends are used to these kinds of inquiries by now. They’ve stopped asking why and simply trust they’ll someday see the results in the pages of a book.
In this case, I really, really hope they will.
“What do you think?” I ask Noah when I can wait no longer.
“I think I made a good impression Saturday,” he says. “You really want to hang out with me. Fifty times.”
I grit my teeth. “More like I want to keep my job. For fifty years.”
“You’re serious about this?” He meets my eyes then shakes his head in disbelief. “Then I’d really better think of something, or there’s a lot of suffering in our future.”
My eyes flash. “What is so wrong with this list?”
“The Austrian Cultural Forum? You want to spend a Saturday with me at the Austrian Cultural Forum?”
“It’s an architectural marvel! Twenty-four stories high and just twenty-five feet wide!”
“Well, bravo to the architect,” he says. “But just because the two of us stand before this marvel doesn’t mean a book idea will fall into my head.”
“Why are you pretending that the concept of inspiration is so foreign to you?” I snap at him. “You’ve written ten books. Surely you know by now that writers go out in the world, look around, and get ideas?”
“Not like this,” he says. “I can save us both a lot of torture by stating now: It’s not going to work.”