Cut from a 2015 book project—I hope!

.... but after high school, at Juliard, he went in for composition and for a while, he was an emerging musical composer in the world of modern dance, but then his lifelong penchant for addictive substances took over and he became a drug addict before netting out at drunk.

            There are certain people who do not want to heal. People who need access to the specific briny beauty that the world affords you when you’re high; the transcendental high notes, the paludal lows. There are lots of performing artists with substance abuse problems, but the really successful ones have teams of people who check the automatic payment box on their cellphone bills for them, who schedule their hotel wake-up calls, who buy them airplane tickets and drive them to the planes.

            Or they play in a band and survive on a system of checks and balances with the other members of the group. With some exceptions, the severly drug addled are not playing Rachmoninov for a sold-out house in Lincoln Center. Stephan could have been a great composer, or he could have made a tolerable amount of money showing up (or sleeping through) gigs in hotel bars, but for him, it was the prestige of the concert pianist, or it was nothing else.

Cut from a 2015 book project—I hope!

She had a call on her voicemail from Maven Fox. It had started. The girls knew that she was back in town. Just like her sister, Lola, Sloane had her own set of girls. She called them the monograms and she’d gone to high school with them. Just like Lola’s set, these women were born as little girls in Connecticut, then they went south and west to come of age during college, then northeast to Manhattan for their first jobs in banking and event management and PR, and then they moved back to the bedroom town of Connecticut once they’d found a hedge fund manager to share a bed with. And then they had the kids. It was astonishing, all of the off-spring produced by former friends of hers. All of the darn kids. Sloane wanted no children until she became pregnant, and once she had one, she wanted two. When she was told by her husband that he never again wanted to have sex with her, she wanted all of the children. She wanted, effectively, to drown in kids. And now she’d come home to a set of women she used to be friends with who had everything they’d ever wanted: rich men who got it up for them, rainforest showers, radiant flooring, and 3.1 kids.

            Maven had run into Stephanie Williams who had run into her mom who had said that Sloane was back in town. Could it possibly be true? They absolutely totally just had to get together. How long was she around? Did she have plans for Thanksgiving? Well, obvs, of course she did! But they positively had to get together. Restaura did white wine flights now. They had to make a plan.

            Listen. Sloane doesn’t hate her female friends from high school. She envied the fact that they were already in their golden years, was the thing. Recently, at a party, she’d met someone who told her about a friend of theirs who’s life goal was to own a house with a two-car garage. At thirty-four, he’d done it. He wasn’t interested in kids or career advancement, just the house and the garage and now he had it and the rest of his life was just bonus footage, as far as he was concerned. Sloane envied her old friends for much the same reason—their DNA seemed to be configured without the restless gene that hers had. Sloane didn’t have an overarching goal for her life except that she wanted to feel less frenetic and concerned about her chances for survival, which was difficult to do in a world where restaurant managers were shot in the stomach for running out of bread bowls and (victims of sinking vessels) used dead porpoises as life preserver vests.