Well, my dear, it has a name now.

My closest friend died in April of 2022. Nobody knew me so well, made me laugh so hard, or trusted me as completely as I trusted him. We met in 1979 when he was hired to take my place as slush reader for The Viking Press. I had been promoted to editorial assistant. He was young and very good looking, but also terribly nervous, which struck me as a strange combination. It was my job to show him the ropes, but all I wanted to do was make him laugh.

Slush was the lowliest job in publishing, but it came with its own tiny office where the door closed and the big window opened. It was also, for me anyway, the most fun. We sat at the big desk with the door closed, the window open, smoking our asses off and began opening the dozens of new pieces of mail from that day. Slush dealt with everything that came in without an agent—manuscripts, query letters, you name it, we got it. We opened everything, took a look, then sent it back with as kind a rejection as we were capable of. He did once get a manuscript that was 200 pages of anti-semitic ranting, and his note back read, ”You can stick this up your ass, from whence, no doubt, it issued.” We often found ourselves reading aloud to each other something we found funny, or pompously annoying, or just plain dreadful. But there was also the possibility of finding raw treasures. If there was a piece of writing we loved, we could show it to a real editor.

Once in a while something was funny, poignant and hopeless all wrapped up together. We never forgot one particular letter, addressed to the Editor In Chief, so of course it had come to slush. It was from a man who had been the produce manager of a large supermarket somewhere on Long Island. He wanted to write a novel about his experiences there, he had seen so much, he said. But he didn’t know how, and needed advice. The last line was, “I’ll do anything you say.” We laughed, not out of meanness, we laughed because it was all so hopeless. We would repeat that line to each other over the years that followed, when faced with something impossible.

It was a good way to get to know somebody. There’s nothing like a shared sense of humor, a shared sense of the poignantly hopeless, to forge a bond. On paper we had nothing in common. I was 37, twice divorced and had four children, he was 27, married happily, and had no children yet. He had gone to graduate school, I had a high school education. But we hit it off. People complained that when we were together, there was nobody else in the room.

Why did we become friends so fast, I asked him twenty-six years later, when I was writing the book he asked me to write, a book about our friendship. “Neither of us had any ambition,” he answered. It was true. I left Viking when I was promoted to assistant editor, a responsibility I didn’t want. I had become an agent almost by accident, as I had been hired by an excellent agency, where my job at first had been simply to read what came in that nobody else had time to read. Chuck had joined me there in 1989, leaving Viking, where he had become a senior editor, editing Stephen King. I had also become a writer, the only thing I had ever wanted to do. A year or two later, he became KIng’s agent. And also mine. We were working and laughing together again.

In the years since his death, as I wrote and thought and dreamed about my dead friend, I began to see in stark relief just how lucky we had been, and appreciate what we had given each other, forgiven each other, what we had learned from each other, how precious our friendship had been. Maybe because I had always taken it for granted, like breathing in and out, and Death corrected that. Slowly, without my even knowing it, gratitude, a word I hated, had found its way in. Grief and gratitude, a useful pair. I never understood the power of gratitude. I get it now.

I will offer one small pivotal moment. It was when we'd only known each other for a month two, and we were eating our lunches by the duck pond in Central Park. I already knew I could ask him any crazy thing and he'd have the answer. As we were sitting there, looking at the ducks, looking at the water, I asked him if he ever felt a longing for something without knowing what it was. He nodded. “What is it,” I asked. “What is it we’re longing for?” I will never forget his answer.

"There isn't any it,” he said," there is only the longing."