Playworld

by Adam Ross

“Remember,” Andy said. “Two kinds of men succeed with women: those who love them and those who hate them.”

“Those who annoy us the most remind us of ourselves.”

been suffering, one that had dogged me of late, during our vacation and afterward, but that I recognized from all the way back to the fire. It had been so omnipresent it was more like an atmosphere—one that, having been made aware of it, I could neither unsee nor unfeel, and its name was loneliness.

so salty he woke at night cottonmouthed as if he’d been on a bender.

Remember this!

he said to me that we process all trauma like the oyster. We pearl the dangerous particle, if we are lucky, into something precious, into the gift.

Talent, I thought. That great leveler. Smasher of gates and all-access pass. Velvet-rope opener and the penthouse view. Follow me please, says the maître d’ to talent, I have our best table waiting. That uniquely and unfairly bestowed gift America had figured out how to tap more efficiently and mercilessly than any other country in history. It should be written on the goddamn Statue of Liberty: Give me your talented, your gifted, your huddled geniuses, yearning to breathe free. That was our country’s exceptionalism—her thrown-wide-open doors she might just as suddenly slam shut. Rob my father of his money, like that insurance agent did; call him Burger or hebe or kike, but you still could not wrest from him his talent. I said I was not the only one to notice how perfect Dad was as the lead, how—I truly believe this—the fortunes of that show might have been otherwise if he’d been properly cast, if they’d given him his one shot.