Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis — Read

A Spago had appeared off Main Street last April, almost twenty years to the day after the original had opened above Sunset Boulevard in L. A., and where I first took Blair in the cream-colored 450 SL after an Elvis Costello concert at the Greek Theatre, and at a window table overlooking the city I told her that I'd been accepted by Camden and that I was leaving for New Hampshire at the end of August and she fell silent for the rest of dinner. (Blair, a girl from Laurel Canyon, had actually quoted Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" on her senior page in the Buckley yearbook, which made me silently cringe at the time, but now, twenty years later, the couplet she chose moved me to tears.) When Jayne and I entered the restaurant it was already half-empty. We were seated at a window table and our waiter had shiny hair and was midway through reciting the specials when he recognized Jayne, at which point his drone became falsely chipper, his timidity activated by her presence. I noticed this. Jayne did not, because she was staring at me sadly, and her expression didn't change when I ordered a Stoli and grapefruit juice. She accepted this and ordered a glass of the house Viognier. We touched hands across the table. Her eyes wandered away and out the window; it was cold and Main Street's storefronts were darkened and a traffic light swung above an empty intersection, flashing a yellow light. We were both less stern. We'd become simplified, anchored, nothing was shifting or panicked here between the two of us, and we wanted to be tender with each other.

"First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, and then the drink takes the man," she was murmuring.