My friend John says these words as we’re sitting on the terrace of a house we’ve rented on a small island in Thailand. It’s early January and we’ve come here for a month to work—him on a book project and a magazine article, me on a book I’ve been writing for two and half years, the one you are reading now. We’ve spent four weeks working from morning to night interrupted only by meals cooked by two shy women who arrive in the morning and leave in the evening and blush when we praise and thank them for the delicious food. It’s dinnertime now. Fading sun and stars commingle in the early evening sky as the women load plates with curried vegetables and steamed rice. I’ve told John I’ve booked a room at the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok on the way back to New York and he tosses a memory of a gin and tonic he drank in his early twenties into the air as casually as he would a receipt in the trash. But I catch it and hold on. This drink he consumed decades ago now sits on the dinner table between us, and nothing else holds my attention—not the last panels of light sliding along the rippling sea below, the flickering candles, the magnificent food.
