Sam had never felt that kind of pull toward an activity or a hobby or a profession. He’d liked hockey well enough, but it hadn’t hurt him to drop it. Same with a cappella, and the fraternity, and he could already tell that he wasn’t going to miss morning pages, even though he’d enjoyed sitting with Gracie every day, watching her bent over her notebook, scribbling intently in purple ink. He certainly wasn’t going to miss his mom sniffing as she announced that “journal” was not a verb.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Sarah said, hearing condemnation in Sam’s silence. “But Mom did always say you were a late bloomer.”
“She said that?” Sam felt angry. More than that, he felt tired.
Sarah’s voice was small. “Oops.” Then she said, “Look, you’ll figure it out. There’s no rush. If you are missing something—and I’m not saying you are—you’ve got plenty of time to find it.”
Sam would have many occasions to revisit Gracie’s assessment, and Sarah’s, and his mom’s, as the years went on, as he graduated from college and followed Marcus to LA （“Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty!” Marcus had crowed）。 Marcus wanted to be an agent, and got a job as an assistant in one of the big talent agencies while Sam, who’d studied coding, found a niche in the legal world, in internet security, search engine optimization, and reputation management. He helped law firms establish their online profiles, ensuring their names came up first in the searches that people conducted, that the articles and links the firms wanted highlighted appeared near the top of the queue, and that anything less positive or flattering got pushed toward the bottom. He could have done his work anywhere, but he figured that Hollywood was the land of reinvention, a place where people changed their faces, their names, their bodies, their entire identities. If Sam was going to figure out who he was, there were worse places to do it.
He and Marcus were roommates for the first few years. Then Marcus had gotten engaged and moved out, and Sam had kept the two-bedroom apartment in Los Feliz, turning the second bedroom into a home office. He thought that he’d miss the seasons—the fall foliage, the first snow in the winter—but he quickly got used to the temperate weather, the sunny days and cool nights, and found that he didn’t miss the blizzards that turned the roads into impassible, ice-rutted obstacle courses, or the bleak, gray days of late winter, or the August humidity.
He worked. He took up hiking and joined a tennis club, where he played tennis two mornings a week. He saw friends, from college and the few new ones he’d made at the office. He kept in touch with Gracie, who was living in Seattle as part of a throuple, managing a clothing boutique. Every few months, she’d find a cheap flight to LA. She’d sleep in the second bedroom and cajole Sam into taking her on the star tours, or to Universal Studios, or to Malibu, where they’d drive along the twisting roads and Gracie would insist that every middle-aged man they saw was Kelsey Grammer.
Sam had no trouble meeting women—at work, at the tennis club, in line for the movies. He had a number of relationships, even though none of the women he’d dated had ever set him aflame the way Gracie had. He told himself it was because he couldn’t get out of his own head. When he’d been with Jamie, a sommelier, she’d taken him to wine tastings, and together they’d spent a week in Napa （“I like wine!” he’d told Sarah, who’d just shrugged）。 When he’d been with Miranda, who worked in Business Affairs for one of the networks and loved to ride her bike, he’d started taking bike trips （“It’s an excellent workout. Very low-impact,” he said, when Sarah merely raised her eyebrows at the five-thousand-dollar carbon-frame road bike he’d bought）。 And, instead of getting dumped, whenever a relationship hit the six-month mark, when it was time to either break up or commit to going forward, with everything that would entail, Sam would always opt to leave. He’d never been sure, with the bone-deep certainty that marriage required, that the woman he was with was the right woman for him; the one he could be with for the rest of his life. When you know, you know, everyone from Sarah to Marcus to his own father had said, and, so far, Sam hadn’t. He didn’t want to waste anyone’s time, especially as he, and the women he dated, both got older. He also, he realized, didn’t want to get his heart broken again, or told that there was something missing about him, so he made sure that he was the one who did the dumping.