This story was originally published December 5, 1995.
I saw Hugh Steers yesterday on lower Broadway, caught sight of him from behind, with the collar of his black leather jacket turned up against the first real cold of the season, a bit of his unruly cowlick springing up at the back of his skull. I hurried to catch him, feeling elated. Then the light changed and he stepped into the gutter and stopped short to avoid a taxi and looked north and I saw his profile and it wasn’t Hugh at all. How could it have been?
Like a lot of New Yorkers, Hugh Steers and I were what you might call good acquaintances. Our relationship was intermittent and had elements of mutual attraction and fascination and half-trust and, of course, utility. We’d met in an odd way, over dinner with his mother, a character so outsize that it struck me then, as it does now, as a perversity of fate that she’s invariably described in terms of some relatives of hers (Gore Vidal, the late Jacqueline Onassis) whose fame is grotesque.
I’d been told by the woman who invited me to dine that Nina Straight was bringing her son, a painter. I’d also been informed, gratuitously, that Nina Straight’s son the painter had AIDS. It’s common enough in this town to be presented with information that says nothing, illuminates nothing, demonstrates nothing beyond a generalized anxiety, and I felt, at the time, vaguely angry with my hostess for miniaturizing Hugh, thinking of the many other things she might have told me about him besides his clinical status.
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