Part Nick Hornby, part Jay McInerney, with a dash of vermouth,In the Roomsis a warm, sharply observed comedy about sex, lies, drinking, and second chancesLondon literary agent Patrick Miller comes to New York dreaming of joining the big league, only to find himself selling celebrity dog books. But when he spots legendary novelist Douglas Kelsey on the street and follows him into an AA meeting, a world of opportunity beckons. Who knew that sobriety offered such networking possibilities? Or that the women would be so attractive? Soon he's a regular attendee at AA meetings, but there's only one problem--he's not an alcoholic.

TOM SHONE is a former film critic for the Sunday Times. He has written for Talk magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the London Telegraph. He lives in New York City.

chapter one

IT WAS A COLD, clear morning, the sun low in the sky, casting long shadows that stretched the length of the sidewalk. My breath formed little clouds of vapor in front of my face that evaporated instantly. I tightened my coat, tucked in my scarf, and fell into step behind a man in a Burberry raincoat, a copy of the Wall Street Journal under his arm. Always a safe bet—a man in a Burberry raincoat, carrying a copy of the Wall Street Journal under his arm. After nine months in the city, I’d learned to steer clear of anyone with a dog on a leash, a camera around his neck, a baby in a pram, a map in his hand, or a family in tow, all highly likely to commit any one of a number of traffic violations—pulling out in front of you, dawdling, changing lanes without warning, or else just stopping dead on the street. No signal. Just stopping dead, right there in front of you, to gawp, or point, or chitchat, or just hang out, like it was his living room. Nobody stopped on the streets of New York. The only reason for you to stop was if you had reached your destination; that was the only real reason, the only valid excuse. Otherwise, you kept going. That was the genius of the grid system: There was always some direction you could be moving in—left, right, up, down, north, south, east, west. The only people who seemed to understand this properly, funnily enough, were the elderly. The elderly in New York were nothing like the elderly in London, inching along the pavement in their multiple layers of wool and nylon. The elderly in New York were wiry, feral creatures, their haunches sprung like marathon runners, their instincts for a gap in the crowd, for some fleeting point of ingress, honed by decades of pounding the streets. In my first week in the city, I had been expertly cut up by this silver-haired old dear in lime green Lycra jogging shorts and sneakers who zoomed just past the end of my nose, missing me by a whisker. I could only gaze in admiration as she disappeared into the midday crowds, elbows pumping. Get behind one of those, I figured, and it would be like tailing a fire truck or a police car as it hurtled up one of the avenues. They didn’t even look old. They looked young. Only older.
At the end of my street, a heavy refuse truck hissed and moaned, hungry for the black bags tossed into the back by the garbagemen; passersby glanced in, doubtless imagining what it would do to their frail bones, and hurried on. I came to a halt on the corner of Seventh, which was flocked with taxis, beside one of those orange cones belching steam from the subway system. I caught a faceful of cabbagy-smelling steam—what were they doing down there?—and felt my stomach roil. The exact dimensions of my hangover, long suspected but so far not precisely demarcated, revealed themselves to me. This was not going to be one of my more productive days.
I was just considering heading north to cross a little higher up, when my phone rang. Fishing it out of my pocket, I saw Caitlin’s name flash up in blue on the little LED screen. Fuck. What did she want? For a few seconds, I toyed with the idea of not taking the call, then duty, or guilt, or some mixture of the two, kicked in. I flipped open the phone and held it to my ear.
“Caitlin. Hi.”
There was a pause before she spoke, and she sounded sheepish when she did. “Patrick … hi.… I’m sorry to call. I just wanted you to know that I shouldn’t have sent that e-mail. What you get up to now is your own business. I’m sorry.”
The e-mail, terse with sarcasm, had been the first thing in my in-tray that morning. “Liked your profile on Simpatico.com. Glad to see you’re feeling a little more ‘chipper’ these days—Caitlin.” I had groaned when I read it. An actual groan escaped my lips. They really ought to put a warning on those things; I thought: THE FIRST PERSON TO READ THIS WILL BE YOUR EX-GIRLFRIEND.Then see how many people called themselves “adventurous” yet “earthy,” “spontaneous” yet “considerate,” “outgoing” yet “shy” or said that they liked to “laugh a lot,” mostly at themselves. If you believed all that you read on the dating Web sites, New York was populated entirely with zany yet grounded twentysomethings engaged in citywide hunts for the best cupcake shop, while laughing at themselves, madly. It was all lies. Most people I knew were too busy working like dogs to embark on spontaneous road trips in custom-painted ice-cream trucks, or to cook blue spaghetti for their art-school friends, or any other of the madcap activities that made up the three-ring circus that was supposed to be your life. I like to live each day as if it were my last. How was that any way to live? If I was to live every day as if it were my last, I’d spend the rest of my life drunk, six cigarettes stuffed in my mouth, sobbing down the phone at relatives I hadn’t called in ages in a funk of fear and loathing. How was that a good way to spend the entirety of the rest of your life? My Wednesdays were bad enough as it was.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You had every right. It must have been a shock seeing me on that thing. It’s not what you think. I’m not using it to go on any dates. It’s just … window-shopping.”
“Window-shopping.”
It didn’t sound so good when she said it.
“Yes. You know. Fantasy. Pretend. You think I’m ready for someone else? Are you kidding me? Of course I’m not. I just wanted to know what it might be like to feel okay again. Reassurance that I wouldn’t feel like this forever.”
“Reassurance that you wouldn’t feel like this forever.”
“Yes,” I said, wondering why she was repeating everything I was saying. That couldn’t be good.
“I see,” she said icily. “So you’re not feeling so ‘chipper’ anymore, then?”
Ouch. Okay. That was embarrassing. Word That Best Describes Your Current State of Mind. I’d been trying to strike a note of Cockney insouciance. Cheeky-chappy kind of thing. Allow them to infer how dumb I thought the question, while also hinting at the unusual word choices you got with dating a Brit in New York. Across the street, the light changed, and my little pack of pedestrians surged forward. I racked up a decent pace in the hopes the conversation would follow suit.
“Okay, look, this isn’t fair, Caitlin. I was just trying to move on. It’s been three months now.”
“It’s been one and a half.”
“No.”
“It’s been exactly six weeks.”
“I thought it was three.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Turning onto Eleventh Street, I found myself engulfed by a swarm of schoolchildren, all holding hands, jabbering away in what sounded like three different languages. I took immediate evasive action, but it was too late, and I found myself slowing to a virtual standstill. Nobody had told me there would be children in New York. I decided the time had come for an experimental note of anger to see where it got me.
“Okay, look, this is ridiculous. You’re sounding like it wasn’t you who ended the whole thing. You threw me out.”
“I don’t want to go over that whole thing again. That is not true. I didn’t throw you out.”
“You more or less did.”
“Can you even tell the truth, Patrick? What happens when you try? Does it hurt your mouth? You’re incredible, absolutely incredible. Do you want to know what the worst thing was? It was the fact that you put yoga under ‘hobbies and interests.’ After all the times I asked you to go. I mean, if the question had been ‘Things my last girlfriend asked me to do but I always refused,’ that would have been an honest answer. As a profile of me, that would have been an honest answer—”
“I’m interested! That makes it an interest!”
“—and baking! Okay, here’s a tip. If you’re going to put baking as a hobby, then when they ask you about the items you have in your fridge, don’t put ‘a bottle of champagne’ and ‘a chocolate bar.’ You can’t bake with champagne and chocolate.”
I thought hard for a recipe that used champagne and chocolate and came up short. Something was bothering me about this conversation, something nagging at its periphery that I couldn’t put my finger on. On my left, two schoolgirls had lost hold of each other’s hands. I saw my chance and pushed through them.
“You have no idea what I’m up to these days—”
“Well, I’m pretty certain it doesn’t involve baking and yoga! Good Lord! The only reason I knew it was you was because you put Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth as your favorite book. You may want to do something about that. That’s not the sort of thing that’ll have ’em queuing up at your door in this city. Biographies of dead Nazi architects.”
“He was the one Nazi who was man enough to stand up at Nuremberg and—” I began, when suddenly it came to me. But of course! How could I have been so stupid! It had been staring me in the face all along! “Hang on … How come you were reading my profile?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
“What were you even doing on Simpatico.com?” I asked.
An even longer silence, in which I could sense the swell of victory.
“A friend of mine is a member,” she said finally.
“Ah. A friend,” I said jubilantly, feeling the power of my newfound victimhood surging up beneath me like a submarine beneath the feet of a drowning man. “Of course. Right. How silly of me. Afriend.”
“You can believe what you want, Patrick. I gave up trying to convince you of anything a long time ago. That’s not why I was calling anyway.”
“Oh no?” I asked, feeling the submarine drop back beneath the waves. “Why were you calling?”
“Kira and Mark said you’d asked them out to dinner, and I was wondering if—well, I just think it would be easier if we had a clean break.”
“Meaning what exactly? That I shouldn’t call them ever?”
“I just don’t feel okay about it.”
I slowed to a halt outside of a pizza parlor on the corner of Sixth Avenue, causing the woman behind me to mutter audibly. I glared at her hunched, miserable back as she passed: Couldn’t she see I was having a conversation? “But what will they think if I just disappear off the map like that? Without saying a word? Don’t you think they’ll think it’s a little bit rude?”
“Please, Patrick. Just do this one thing for me.”
“But they’re the only people I really know in this…” I began before trailing off, the memory of what I had written in the Why You Should Get to Know Me section winking at me like the light of an unexploded bomb.
“Okay, okay,” I said grumpily. “Whatever you say. I won’t call them.”
“Thanks. I know this is hard. It’s hard for me, too.”
“I know. Listen, I’d better go; I’m right outside my office.”
Inside World-Famous Original Ray’s Pizza, two Hispanic teenagers ladled red gloop into big doughy pizza bases.
“Okay, well … take care, Patrick.”
Her tone was neutered, inscrutable.
“You, too.”
I closed the phone and slipped it into my pocket, going back over the conversation I had just had, probing for weak points in her argument and patching up places where mine could have been stronger. She had dumped me. Maybe she hadn’t thrown me out of her apartment, but she had dumped me. And it had been three months ago, unless you counted the night we fell off the wagon that time. You couldn’t count that. And I had given some serious thought to a yoga class. The baking, not so much, but nobody told the truth on that thing. It was aspirational: You described the person you wantedto be. It was the American Dream—your chance to reinvent yourself. The only time anybody told the truth was in the What I Am Looking For section, which was basically the place your last relationship went to die. It echoed with the sound of niggles and peeves. “No workaholics, passive-aggressive, brainwashed Stepford men or Republicans,” wrote one girl, Nolita657. “No cynics or assholes, and you know who you are.…” It reminded me of that Carly Simon song, the one where she went, “You’re so vain, I’ll bet you think this song is about you.” Okay. First thing. Why would a vain man think that song was about him? Surely he’d pick a far more flattering song, “Holding out for a Hero,” say, or “Dream Lover,” or, if it absolutely had to be a Carly Simon song, “Nobody Does it Better.” I’d always liked that one. But the one song in the songbook accusing him of vanity? I’d almost written to Nolita657 to point all this out, but something had stopped me—a sudden weariness at the thought of slotting into place behind the last guy, even, now that I thought about it, a spooky semblance of Caitlin to the girl’s tone. Jesus. Maybe it really had been Caitlin. Thank Christ we hadn’t gone on a date. I felt a sudden chill, shivered, retied my scarf, and pushed off north toward the office.

Copyright © 2009, 2011 by Tom Shone

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chapter one

IT WAS A COLD, clear morning, the sun low in the sky, casting long shadows that stretched the length of the sidewalk. My breath formed little clouds of vapor in front of my face that evaporated instantly. I tightened my coat, tucked in my scarf, and fell into step behind a man in a Burberry raincoat, a copy of the Wall Street Journal under his arm. Always a safe bet—a man in a Burberry raincoat, carrying a copy of the Wall Street Journal under his arm. After nine months in the city, I’d learned to steer clear of anyone with a dog on a leash, a camera around his neck, a baby in a pram, a map in his hand, or a family in tow, all highly likely to commit any one of a number of traffic violations—pulling out in front of you, dawdling, changing lanes without warning, or else just stopping dead on the street. No signal. Just stopping dead, right there in front of you, to gawp, or point, or chitchat, or just hang out, like it was his living room. Nobody stopped on the streets of New York. The only reason for you to stop was if you had reached your destination; that was the only real reason, the only valid excuse. Otherwise, you kept going. That was the genius of the grid system: There was always some direction you could be moving in—left, right, up, down, north, south, east, west. The only people who seemed to understand this properly, funnily enough, were the elderly. The elderly in New York were nothing like the elderly in London, inching along the pavement in their multiple layers of wool and nylon. The elderly in New York were wiry, feral creatures, their haunches sprung like marathon runners, their instincts for a gap in the crowd, for some fleeting point of ingress, honed by decades of pounding the streets. In my first week in the city, I had been expertly cut up by this silver-haired old dear in lime green Lycra jogging shorts and sneakers who zoomed just past the end of my nose, missing me by a whisker. I could only gaze in admiration as she disappeared into the midday crowds, elbows pumping. Get behind one of those, I figured, and it would be like tailing a fire truck or a police car as it hurtled up one of the avenues. They didn’t even look old. They looked young. Only older.
At the end of my street, a heavy refuse truck hissed and moaned, hungry for the black bags tossed into the back by the garbagemen; passersby glanced in, doubtless imagining what it would do to their frail bones, and hurried on. I came to a halt on the corner of Seventh, which was flocked with taxis, beside one of those orange cones belching steam from the subway system. I caught a faceful of cabbagy-smelling steam—what were they doing down there?—and felt my stomach roil. The exact dimensions of my hangover, long suspected but so far not precisely demarcated, revealed themselves to me. This was not going to be one of my more productive days.
I was just considering heading north to cross a little higher up, when my phone rang. Fishing it out of my pocket, I saw Caitlin’s name flash up in blue on the little LED screen. Fuck. What did she want? For a few seconds, I toyed with the idea of not taking the call, then duty, or guilt, or some mixture of the two, kicked in. I flipped open the phone and held it to my ear.
“Caitlin. Hi.”
There was a pause before she spoke, and she sounded sheepish when she did. “Patrick … hi.… I’m sorry to call. I just wanted you to know that I shouldn’t have sent that e-mail. What you get up to now is your own business. I’m sorry.”
The e-mail, terse with sarcasm, had been the first thing in my in-tray that morning. “Liked your profile on Simpatico.com. Glad to see you’re feeling a little more ‘chipper’ these days—Caitlin.” I had groaned when I read it. An actual groan escaped my lips. They really ought to put a warning on those things; I thought: THE FIRST PERSON TO READ THIS WILL BE YOUR EX-GIRLFRIEND.Then see how many people called themselves “adventurous” yet “earthy,” “spontaneous” yet “considerate,” “outgoing” yet “shy” or said that they liked to “laugh a lot,” mostly at themselves. If you believed all that you read on the dating Web sites, New York was populated entirely with zany yet grounded twentysomethings engaged in citywide hunts for the best cupcake shop, while laughing at themselves, madly. It was all lies. Most people I knew were too busy working like dogs to embark on spontaneous road trips in custom-painted ice-cream trucks, or to cook blue spaghetti for their art-school friends, or any other of the madcap activities that made up the three-ring circus that was supposed to be your life. I like to live each day as if it were my last. How was that any way to live? If I was to live every day as if it were my last, I’d spend the rest of my life drunk, six cigarettes stuffed in my mouth, sobbing down the phone at relatives I hadn’t called in ages in a funk of fear and loathing. How was that a good way to spend the entirety of the rest of your life? My Wednesdays were bad enough as it was.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You had every right. It must have been a shock seeing me on that thing. It’s not what you think. I’m not using it to go on any dates. It’s just … window-shopping.”
“Window-shopping.”
It didn’t sound so good when she said it.
“Yes. You know. Fantasy. Pretend. You think I’m ready for someone else? Are you kidding me? Of course I’m not. I just wanted to know what it might be like to feel okay again. Reassurance that I wouldn’t feel like this forever.”
“Reassurance that you wouldn’t feel like this forever.”
“Yes,” I said, wondering why she was repeating everything I was saying. That couldn’t be good.
“I see,” she said icily. “So you’re not feeling so ‘chipper’ anymore, then?”
Ouch. Okay. That was embarrassing. Word That Best Describes Your Current State of Mind. I’d been trying to strike a note of Cockney insouciance. Cheeky-chappy kind of thing. Allow them to infer how dumb I thought the question, while also hinting at the unusual word choices you got with dating a Brit in New York. Across the street, the light changed, and my little pack of pedestrians surged forward. I racked up a decent pace in the hopes the conversation would follow suit.
“Okay, look, this isn’t fair, Caitlin. I was just trying to move on. It’s been three months now.”
“It’s been one and a half.”
“No.”
“It’s been exactly six weeks.”
“I thought it was three.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Turning onto Eleventh Street, I found myself engulfed by a swarm of schoolchildren, all holding hands, jabbering away in what sounded like three different languages. I took immediate evasive action, but it was too late, and I found myself slowing to a virtual standstill. Nobody had told me there would be children in New York. I decided the time had come for an experimental note of anger to see where it got me.
“Okay, look, this is ridiculous. You’re sounding like it wasn’t you who ended the whole thing. You threw me out.”
“I don’t want to go over that whole thing again. That is not true. I didn’t throw you out.”
“You more or less did.”
“Can you even tell the truth, Patrick? What happens when you try? Does it hurt your mouth? You’re incredible, absolutely incredible. Do you want to know what the worst thing was? It was the fact that you put yoga under ‘hobbies and interests.’ After all the times I asked you to go. I mean, if the question had been ‘Things my last girlfriend asked me to do but I always refused,’ that would have been an honest answer. As a profile of me, that would have been an honest answer—”
“I’m interested! That makes it an interest!”
“—and baking! Okay, here’s a tip. If you’re going to put baking as a hobby, then when they ask you about the items you have in your fridge, don’t put ‘a bottle of champagne’ and ‘a chocolate bar.’ You can’t bake with champagne and chocolate.”
I thought hard for a recipe that used champagne and chocolate and came up short. Something was bothering me about this conversation, something nagging at its periphery that I couldn’t put my finger on. On my left, two schoolgirls had lost hold of each other’s hands. I saw my chance and pushed through them.
“You have no idea what I’m up to these days—”
“Well, I’m pretty certain it doesn’t involve baking and yoga! Good Lord! The only reason I knew it was you was because you put Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth as your favorite book. You may want to do something about that. That’s not the sort of thing that’ll have ’em queuing up at your door in this city. Biographies of dead Nazi architects.”
“He was the one Nazi who was man enough to stand up at Nuremberg and—” I began, when suddenly it came to me. But of course! How could I have been so stupid! It had been staring me in the face all along! “Hang on … How come you were reading my profile?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
“What were you even doing on Simpatico.com?” I asked.
An even longer silence, in which I could sense the swell of victory.
“A friend of mine is a member,” she said finally.
“Ah. A friend,” I said jubilantly, feeling the power of my newfound victimhood surging up beneath me like a submarine beneath the feet of a drowning man. “Of course. Right. How silly of me. Afriend.”
“You can believe what you want, Patrick. I gave up trying to convince you of anything a long time ago. That’s not why I was calling anyway.”
“Oh no?” I asked, feeling the submarine drop back beneath the waves. “Why were you calling?”
“Kira and Mark said you’d asked them out to dinner, and I was wondering if—well, I just think it would be easier if we had a clean break.”
“Meaning what exactly? That I shouldn’t call them ever?”
“I just don’t feel okay about it.”
I slowed to a halt outside of a pizza parlor on the corner of Sixth Avenue, causing the woman behind me to mutter audibly. I glared at her hunched, miserable back as she passed: Couldn’t she see I was having a conversation? “But what will they think if I just disappear off the map like that? Without saying a word? Don’t you think they’ll think it’s a little bit rude?”
“Please, Patrick. Just do this one thing for me.”
“But they’re the only people I really know in this…” I began before trailing off, the memory of what I had written in the Why You Should Get to Know Me section winking at me like the light of an unexploded bomb.
“Okay, okay,” I said grumpily. “Whatever you say. I won’t call them.”
“Thanks. I know this is hard. It’s hard for me, too.”
“I know. Listen, I’d better go; I’m right outside my office.”
Inside World-Famous Original Ray’s Pizza, two Hispanic teenagers ladled red gloop into big doughy pizza bases.
“Okay, well … take care, Patrick.”
Her tone was neutered, inscrutable.
“You, too.”
I closed the phone and slipped it into my pocket, going back over the conversation I had just had, probing for weak points in her argument and patching up places where mine could have been stronger. She had dumped me. Maybe she hadn’t thrown me out of her apartment, but she had dumped me. And it had been three months ago, unless you counted the night we fell off the wagon that time. You couldn’t count that. And I had given some serious thought to a yoga class. The baking, not so much, but nobody told the truth on that thing. It was aspirational: You described the person you wantedto be. It was the American Dream—your chance to reinvent yourself. The only time anybody told the truth was in the What I Am Looking For section, which was basically the place your last relationship went to die. It echoed with the sound of niggles and peeves. “No workaholics, passive-aggressive, brainwashed Stepford men or Republicans,” wrote one girl, Nolita657. “No cynics or assholes, and you know who you are.…” It reminded me of that Carly Simon song, the one where she went, “You’re so vain, I’ll bet you think this song is about you.” Okay. First thing. Why would a vain man think that song was about him? Surely he’d pick a far more flattering song, “Holding out for a Hero,” say, or “Dream Lover,” or, if it absolutely had to be a Carly Simon song, “Nobody Does it Better.” I’d always liked that one. But the one song in the songbook accusing him of vanity? I’d almost written to Nolita657 to point all this out, but something had stopped me—a sudden weariness at the thought of slotting into place behind the last guy, even, now that I thought about it, a spooky semblance of Caitlin to the girl’s tone. Jesus. Maybe it really had been Caitlin. Thank Christ we hadn’t gone on a date. I felt a sudden chill, shivered, retied my scarf, and pushed off north toward the office.

Copyright © 2009, 2011 by Tom Shone