Happy Fortunate People
Photo by simpleinsomnia via Flickr Hamish regretted agreeing to the dinner almost immediately, but he arrived at the bistro in Tribeca just before eight and tried to feel good about it.
He had been in the city for two weeks, trying to get acclimated before his contract began, but so far, he mainly spent his time watching people in Union Square. New York was a city in which people were always making plans, a city of interlocking calendars and appointments designed to make everyone else feel left out. New York was a bunch of empty rooms with cordons outside barring entry. New York was a series of attitudes and performances, demands and pleas — a populace at once on fire and losing its mind from boredom. In short, New York was totally ordinary.
Hamish never meant to end up in New York, but instead of doing rural medicine in Alabama the way he wanted to, he accepted a large pile of money to work as a concierge doctor in a small, tight Manhattan practice. The job offer materialized the way things always did — from the ether of his friendships with the fleet of rich people he’d met at Yale, particularly Soren, whose family had so much money that they were virtually their own economy. After medical school, Soren returned to New York for plastics at NYU, while Hamish continued his itinerant wandering and ended up in family medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. In school, they had been very good friends, and for weeks at a time, more than friends.
Soren arrived at ten after eight, only marginally late. He was in a skinny suit, the jacket of which he was already removing by the time he stepped through the door, and he looked sweaty and flustered. Otherwise, he looked so much like himself that Hamish was a little startled. Had it really been six years? What had he expected?
Hamish stood up in greeting, but Soren waved at him to sit back down.
“No, no,” he said, “none of that. I’m sweating like a pig. God, it’s so humid.”
Hamish’s grandfather used to say that simple minds and strangers turned to the weather. This came to him with the involuntary spasm of memory. He suppressed a smile. They were at one end of a shared table, and people kept squeezing by them. Occasionally, their water glasses shook.
“I told you to order. You didn’t have to wait.”
“Oh,” Hamish said. “Yeah, I know. But I’m not really in a hurry. I didn’t mind.”
Soren frowned in concentration. Then he put his hand on the table and stroked its grain with his thumb. He was flat-footed by Hamish’s patience, it seemed, and this embarrassed Hamish for the both of them because he didn’t mean to express patience, and he didn’t mean to make Soren feel bad. He fell into a prickly quiet himself, just as their waiter — trim, black, with dreads and a brilliant smile — appeared.
“Can I do for you?” he asked, as if in medias res.
“I’ll have a white. And” — Soren’s eyebrows raised, at which Hamish shrugged — “seltzer?”
“Yeah, that’s good.”
“Seltzer for him, a white for me, whatever you think is the best, but I’d like it a bit dry.”
“We have just the thing,” the waiter said. He must have been accustomed to sifting the vague preferences of strangers into something textured and understandable. It was like an epilanguage, drifting as it did above words, referential, a symbol of a symbol, an abstraction of an abstraction. Notions. The waiter’s eyes shifted to Hamish.
“You sure a seltzer is all I can get for you?”
“I’m sure,” he said.
“Well, alright then. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
Soren watched the waiter’s retreating back, and he said to Hamish, “Well.”
“Don’t start,” Hamish said.
“What are you getting?” Soren asked. “My treat. Get whatever you want.”
“I can’t let you do that — you already did so much.”
“No, no, don’t worry. I want it for you. Get whatever.”
“I can afford to treat you now,” Hamish said, resenting himself and Soren at the same time. “This isn’t med school.”
“Hammy, let me be nice to you,” Soren said flatly but not unkindly.
Hamish did not respond. The muscles of his jaw tensed. He tasted, briefly, copper and heat. The menu was sturdy cardstock secured to a plank of reclaimed wood by a binder clip. The paper was splattered in one corner with red wine.
“Thank you, that’s generous.”
“Hamish.”
“I mean it,” he said. “Thank you.”
Soren sighed. “Plus
