Thanksgiving
An Exclusive Preview Excerpt
Important: The novel excerpted here is a work in progress. As such, the text in these pages is still subject to editing and rewriting, and may even be omitted from the finished novel. Please bear this in mind when reading the excerpt, and do not quote any part of it in reviews without first checking against a published copy.
This is a story about an apartment house and the people who live inside… everyday people leading everyday lives. To some it will be a love story, to others a saga about New York. To others still, it will be a tale about a car and the events leading to one particular stormy November night.
The truth is it’s all of these. But most of all, it is an investigation into loss and celebration, infidelity and redemption, and youth and age. In other words, life and death.
—Peter Crowther
Chapter One: Beyond Repair
“I don’t think New York City is like other cities. It is all characters—in fact, it is everything. It can destroy a man, but if his eyes are open it cannot bore him. Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.”
—John Steinbeck, New York Times, February 1 1953
The city awoke to the smell of itself, a grid-designed composite of petroleum, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, feces, urine, sweat, hopes, dreams, rotting vegetables and fresh coffee. A symmetry of hope and despondency, elation and fear, longing and resignation… for emotions too have smells, smells that hang onto the air like ill-fitting clothes rescued from thrift stores, garage and yard sales or the year-round bargain basements that litter the side streets.
At nighttime, all cities sleep deeply. All cities, that is, except New York. New York only dozes. A mixture of paranoia, a constant wonder at and of itself, and a lingering curiosity as to what awaits at the far end of the next second renders it fitful.
This is the moment that it likes the best. A moment that signifies a new day. Filled with new developments, undreamed of possibilities.
Some of the city’s people never see the sun lift itself resignedly over distant rooftops and spires. They never see the long shadows retreat from the stone and the brick, withdrawing like feral creatures afraid of the light, guiltily scuttling across the pitted streets and building-sides, hoisting themselves up the metal pull-down fire escapes and melting across the rooftops into nook and cranny and crevice. Some people never hear the city kick-start its lungs and its heart, once more dragging itself into a semblance of tired life, a muted muffle of early morning feet and of sputtering engines and radio news bulletins, and the plaintive drone of a distant English horn drifting through an open tenement window, the constant block-away wails of sirens gloating or bemoaning battles lost or about to commence, the occasional human howl filled to bursting with the realization of another time of wakefulness to be endured.
But since his wife’s death, Matt Blenheim saw and heard everything.
The days were the easiest. In the daytime, the bustle of the people made recent events less real… like scenes in a TV soap opera, where characters walked off-set and had a coffee or a cigarette, argued with their agent or studied their lines for the next episode. In those fictional slices of so-called everyday life, dead people got to their feet after the end credits and carried on with life, leaving the anguished music and the effects-induced tears of loved ones far behind. Watching from his second story window, Matt saw all daytime life this way: it wasn’t real. It was The Trueman Show multiplied a millionfold, with nothing needing to stay the way he saw it; it was every talk show writ large, without mics and cameras, without autocue or clipboard, without rehearsal or roughcut edits.
Sure, there were people with problems down there on the sidewalk or driving by in cars or trucks or cabs—maybe they had folks sick back at home or holed up in Bellevue or NYU Medical or Cabrini Medical or even Beth Israel Medical or St. Vincent’s, ankles blown up with steroids, smelling of lavender and night stocks left to turn, the first cloying hint of decay hanging on the pallid skin that makes even the lightest kiss both arduous and frightening. But their very movement—the fact that they were out there moving around on the few yards of street and sidewalk in front of Matt’s apartment house—made a lie of it. No not a lie, an inconsequentiality. Hell, life went on despite their troubles and that made those troubles of negligible importance to anyone but them.
The world was a tree all decked out with an electric flex of 600 billion tiny flickering bulb-lights… with every nano-second some of them blinking out and some new ones blinking on with their first faltering personal shines, but the general appearance didn’t alter significantly. The loss of one bulb or the appearance of another mattered only to the handful of bulbs situated nearby.
The daytime held so much light that it was hard to reconcile or even imagine one tiny element fading away. But the night-time was different.
In the night, when the streets cleared of people walking the sidewalk to the store or to work or just to commune with the day, the world grew quiet and introspective. In the gathering darkness, where the homeless people held sway, their heads jerking side to side as they listened to the colors fade and watched the city sounds drop to all-fours, it was all too easy to imagine a light popping out.
