Chapter 7
Why not indeed? When Jade thought of New York, he thought of her, Nan, the goddess in the not-so-little black dress, a figure fading now at the end of a long gallery. Like himself, she was an individual of merit, a person of quality, marginalized by those who should’ve known better. He told himself it would be perfect. He told himself he wouldn’t fall in love, and since she said she was looking for an escape—”Something to make me forget,” was how she put it—he convinced himself that he was serving her ends instead of merely satisfying his own.
He told himself that he—all grown up and three-thousand miles away from home—would finally be a real man, with a real, older mistress and a real adult relationship, scented with liquor and s*x. Except, of course, that like the city that s
