The Accident Read Online Free PDF Page A

won’t be able to afford even Chinatown. He steps into the brand-new coffee shop on the corner, one of those joints that specify the growers and regions and acidity levels of their humanely sourced fair-trade beans. He orders a three-dollar macchiato from an alarmingly muscled and extravagantly tattooed woman wearing a wifebeater and a skullcap, operating a machine that bears more than a passing resemblance to a Lamborghini, house music thumping at seven-thirty a.m., a miasma of patchouli. This café is a shot across the bow, signaling impending rent hikes, even for small walk-up apartments with crappy leaky bathrooms.
    He considers himself in the full-wall mirror, a forty-something editor wearing the professorial outfit—gray slacks, herringbone jacket, blue shirt, repp tie—that’s practically standard-issue to people with his type of job, from his type of college. The only nice piece of clothing is the jacket, which is now getting threadbare, purchased at 80 percent discount at a sample sale in a Midtown hotel’s ballroom, back when his then-girlfriend Sara was trying to remake him into a more fashionable version of himself. She always had access to sample sales, and plus-one invitations to friends-and-family previews of restaurants, and gratis tickets to film screenings. The stray perks that enable permanently broke young New Yorkers to appear glamorous.
    Sara wanted everything. She wanted to be out every night, on every guest list. She wanted to rub shoulders with the rich and famous; shewanted to become one. She’d been deluded by their early relationship, when Jeff was bringing her along to awards ceremonies and book parties, back when people were still throwing book parties as a matter of course. There would be more and more, better and better, and her good-looking successful well-connected husband would help make her Big.
    When she realized that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, she used him a final time, as fodder for her writing, on her way out the door. That book had already been turned into a goddamned play, for crying out loud. Off-Broadway. There was now a film option.
    Jeff was astounded at what some people were willing to do, to advance their careers. He was amazed to discover that he’d married one of those people. He’d married the wrong woman. Or she’d married the wrong man. Both.
    He steps out of the café. Stands on the sidewalk and takes a glance uptown, then down-, not sure what he’s looking for. Then he starts trudging north.
    Jeff will take a pill tonight. He has been sleeping badly these last few months, lying in bed, worrying. About everything. Not just at the office, where he has to admit he has been in a multi-year slump. But worried about his whole life. He has never fought for what he loved—in fact, he has never done a good job of even admitting to loving what he’s loved. It was Sara who proposed to him; it was Sara who unilaterally decided they were finished.
    But soon everything will change. Soon he’ll have another great success, like in the old days, and he too will be able to buy a decent place to live, to pay his bills on time, to save for retirement.
    Jeff wonders whether every one has noticed his midcareer stall: his colleagues, his boss, his friends from college, from the beginning of his career, Isabel. Do people sit around, pitying him? He’s never really entertained the possibility that he’s a loser. Has he been wrong, all these decades? Do losers know it?
    These self-doubts are why he made the decision he did, three monthsago. The decision to really and truly grow up, to do what needs doing in order to find his way in the world as a successful adult, to be willing to make a genuine sacrifice.
    Last night, in the pub with Mason, Jeff was halfway expecting that he’d see that other man. The one who’d accosted him, made the bizarre proposition, in that very same bar.

CHAPTER 4
    R ing .
    Alexis is digging through her purse to find the phone, tossing aside keys and