From the beloved author of The Old Place comes a tender, funny, and fresh novel spanning the 1990s and present day, about a young writer and the community he builds in New York City, and his lonely life 30 years later when an unexpected injury lands him at the local queer senior center.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Bobby Finger’s Four Squares, which is out June 18th 2024.
Artie Anderson wouldn’t call himself lonely, not exactly. He has a beautiful apartment in the West Village, a steady career as a ghostwriter, and he has Halle and Vanessa, who—as the daughter and ex-wife of his former partner—are the closest thing he can call family. But when the women announce a move across the country, on Artie’s 60th birthday no less, Artie realizes that his seemingly full life isn’t quite as full as he imagined. To make matters worse, a surprising injury strips Artie of the independent lifestyle he’s used to and pushes him into the hands of GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center down the street.
Since the death of his ex-boyfriend, Abe decades ago, Artie’s intentionally avoided big crowds and close friends. So, he’s woefully unprepared for the other patrons of GALS, a group of larger-than-life seniors who insist on celebrating each and every day. They refuse to dwell in the past, but Artie, who has never quite recovered from Abe’s death and the loss of his dearest friends, can’t shake the memories of his youth, and of the chances he did, and didn’t, take.
Stretching across the 1990s and the present day, Four Squares is an intimate and profound look at what it means to create community and the lasting impressions even the most fleeting of relationships can leave. With Bobby Finger’s signature warmth, humor, and wit, it is touching reminder that it’s never too late for a second chance at truly living.
1.
1992
The man at the computer felt like he’d been writing different versions of the same sentence his whole life, but it had only been eight hours in the middle of his thirtieth birthday.
- Cookie Squares. They’re anything but.
- These cookies aren’t square. They’re Squares.
- These Squares aren’t square.
- Can you Square it?
- The shape of cookies to come.
- Cookie Squares.
- It’s hip to eat Squares.
- The first Square meal of your day.
- Your first Square meal is anything but.
- Now you’re square.
- Now it’s square.
- Get square.
- Get squares.
- Cookies: part of a square meal.
- Part of a square meal.
Artie Anderson turned away from his computer screen, squeezed the back of his aching neck, and looked at the clock above the corkboard to his left. It had just turned 4:58 p.m., according to a second hand that turned with an unnerving, stealthy smoothness. Artie believed a second hand ought to tick, that time should be delineated by an infinite parade of percussive seconds that could be drowned out but never entirely quieted, so that when you shut up, there it was, that mechanical ticking and tocking, reminding you of everything that could or couldn’t be. He gave a quick massage to the muscles along his spine, the ones whose tightness seemed to radiate and made his head ache every weekday around this time, then went back to the word processor.
In the past eight hours he’d written 298 potential taglines for a new sugary breakfast cereal targeted at children precisely one-third his age. Though he didn’t much enjoy the sample that Pearl Mills had FedExed to the office earlier in the month, he did feel like Cookie Squares deserved better than the nearly three hundred lines he’d written so far. “Quantity leads to quality,” his boss told him his first week on the job, baring his mouthful of glistening, eerily perfect teeth. “The most reliable way to write one great tagline is to write a thousand bad ones first.” Over the past two years, Artie had found the pithy advice to be more or less correct. Though a successful line could be written in mere seconds during a brainstorming session with coworkers—in fact, no fewer than ten creatives in his office still claimed credit for Video Gallery’s beloved “Bring Hollywood Home Tonight” line—most of them were trees sprouted from the seeds of a dense, healthy forest. It was a forest whose perpetual creation brought him a sense of actual calm, since the more time he spent alone writing copy, filling page after page with every possible expression of a single idea, the less time he spent thinking about how profoundly uncomfortable he felt around his coworkers. Today, there were no standouts on his list of four- to ten-word phrases meant to convince petulant children to demand colorful boxes of die-cut sugar from their miserable parents, but there were enough of them that he felt as though work had been done. Artie sent the document to the printer, ripped off the perforated edges, and marched down the hall to Joe’s office in the building’s southeastern corner.
He knocked gently, then pushed the half-open door enough to see Joe squinting at a pile of paper on his desk and rubbing his scalp. Joe was in his mid-forties, dressed like he was in his mid-thirties, and played music as loudly as someone in their mid-twenties. He had a wife and three kids and a dream job but was proudest of his hair, which was long and thick and jet-black without the aid of Just For Men. When he noticed Artie in the doorway, dressed for the part of copywriter with his starched blue shirt tucked tightly into a pair of khaki pants, Joe lowered the volume on his stereo and waved him in with a gesture that, if performed by almost anyone else, would have been welcoming.
“Cookie Squares stuff,” Artie said stiffly as he handed the taglines to Joe, who just tossed them on the only bare spot on his desk. After a pause, Artie reminded Joe that today was his birthday, that he’d already worked with Annette on layouts, and that he more than made up for the hours he’d be gone today elsewhere in the week, since he had to go home right at five to bake his own birthday cake in time for a dinner. He was overflowing with unnecessary excuses and used a defensive tone for no reason, as usual, but Joe eventually shut him up with a flap of the hand.
“I remember,” he said. “What the hell are you still doing here? Go home. Have a great birthday.”
“Thanks Joe.”
“I pay you enough, right?” he asked, finally looking up from the pile of mock-ups with a hint of genuine concern in his eyes.
“What? Yeah. I mean, of course. I’m happy with my compensation. I told HR that at my review whenever that was . . . a few months ago, maybe? Is there a problem?”
“I’m just saying you can save time by throwing money at the problem. Can’t remember the last time my wife baked a cake for our kids. The only food she puts in our oven came straight from the freezer—it’s like she’s somehow got less time than I do. I’ll never understand what she does all day. But what I’m saying is, just go to any bakery, and they’ll make whatever the hell you ask for. Sharks or trucks or Ninja Turtles or—What is it you like?”
“How do you mean?”
Joe sucked in his lips and squinted. “Just go,” he finally said with half a laugh. “Expense the cab home if you want.”
“Subway’s faster, but thanks. Maybe I’ll buy my own cake next year.”
“You won’t regret it.”
Artie’s firm, RKS, had been around for ten years, which was relatively young for the advertising business. It entered the landscape after David Ogilvy changed the game with his now ubiquitous marriage of sparse imagery and large blocks of text. RKS always strove to be off-kilter, more inclined to create trends than follow them. But like most enterprises with noble beginnings, it had already begun to fall into a stasis, albeit a successful one. They had their trophy clients, the ones that paid everyone’s handsome salaries and kept the office more modern and comfortable than any other in the twenty-two-story building they occupied on Madison Avenue, but they hadn’t created a truly noteworthy ad in five years, when Joe’s overtly misogynistic campaign for a deodorant brand won so many awards he had to buy another shelf for his office.
Eventually Joe was promoted to chief creative officer, a job that was more about decision-making than creativity. With it came a light-filled corner office complete with ample space for even more trophies, a suburban living room’s supply of seating, plenty of time away from the family he openly loathed being around, and a mini fridge filled with Diet Coke and Heineken. Unless, of course, clients were visiting, in which case it was emptied and restocked with Diet Pepsi and Bud Light.
Artie had never studied advertising—he was an English major, to the horror of his parents—and applied for the job on a whim, after a man he made out with for six hours at an all-night dance party at the Holy Spirit told him that advertising was a much more reliable way to make money as a writer. Well, first he told him to work for a magazine, but when Artie said he preferred writing fiction, the man licked his lips and said, “Advertising is just lies, and isn’t that a kind of fiction?” Artie found a sort of profundity within the man’s gentle slurring, and thought a quick buck would be better than his miserable job in the human resources department for an insurance company. Joe was surprised by Artie’s application, specifically its total lack of experience in the field, but impressed by his inclusion of short stories, some published and some not. Maybe Artie was the kind of writer the agency needed for a burst of creativity—someone who came from a different world, instead of the same cycle of colleges and programs from which everyone else in the department hailed. He was a white man who knew how to tie a tie, so at the very least he looked the part. The problem, though, was that he never quite felt it. And when Artie felt a needling of discomfort around his coworkers, he preferred to believe it was because of his lack of experience, not because of his lack of any overt sexual identity.
“Running home,” he said to his office-mate and creative partner, Annette, almost out of breath from a jog past the framed advertisements lining the south hallway. “Just gave the lines to Joe, but he seemed swamped and pissed, so I doubt there will be any feedback until after the weekend. You gonna be OK with the layouts, or do you need me to stay?”
“All good,” Annette said, still hunched over the drafting table as usual. He sometimes wished he were an art director and not a copywriter—there was a more palpable drama to their creativity, whereas his own just looked like typing. When she finally looked up and locked eyes with Artie, her face particularly youthful and innocent, she laughed. “I mean it. Go home. Happy birthday.”
He grinned and bolted toward the elevator with a quick slap on the doorframe. “You’re the best. Thanks, Annette.”
A few power-walked blocks south and Artie was on the D train heading toward the West Village. On the one hand, he loved his commute, four stops on a single train that didn’t even have a bend in the tracks. On the other hand, he hated its efficiency, as it prevented him from doing much reading. So, for the better part of his time at RKS, he’d left for the office forty-five minutes earlier than necessary, providing him the time to take in a chapter or two on a Bryant Park bench every morning. Thanks to the comforting anonymity of a metropolitan crowd, it was private time that just happened to be in public, a daily ritual he treasured to the extent that he never told another friend or coworker about it, for fear that its peace would disappear once exposed to another living soul. How were any of his friends, none of whom had a clue about advertising, to know that it wasn’t an industry of late nights and early mornings? The last thing anyone in his department wanted to do was catch a proverbial worm.
It wasn’t until the doors were closing at the 14th Street station that he realized he should have gotten out there. On most days, Artie used the West 4th Street station in the morning and evening, despite it being farther from his apartment, as he enjoyed the walk up and down the West Village’s mess of improbable lefts and rights. Emerging at 14th Street would have saved him a few precious minutes, the remainder of which he calculated in his head once aboveground and jogging to his place. His friends would be arriving by seven, which meant the cake had to be in the oven in twenty minutes if it were to be even remotely cool enough to frost by 6:50.
It was enough time, he thought, but cutting it close. Artie liked a buffer zone in most things, a kind of grace period to be certain everything would go as planned. It was the kind of character trait people didn’t mind calling him out for to his face, an insult disguised as an intimate observation. The last time this happened, when he was the first to arrive at the Quad for a movie, Kimberly commented that it was classic Artie, early when he didn’t need to be and also, somehow, anxious about being somewhere too early, probably because he was the kind of person who left places early, too. She hadn’t said parties or bars specifically, but Artie knew that’s what she’d meant. And so what if Artie preferred to arrive to places early and be in bed at a reasonable hour? Though there had been acid on Kimberly’s lips as she’d joked about him in the otherwise empty theater, Adam laughed anyway at her comment and clapped Artie on the shoulder as they settled in their seats. “Classic Artie,” Kim said. The words echoed inside of him, shaking loose intrusive thoughts as they rattled around.
Artie’s apartment building was on the corner of Bank Street and Greenwich Avenue, in the northeastern corner of the neighborhood. He lived on the fourth floor, and his living room looked out onto Greenwich, not quite east, providing the perfect angle for a gentle morning sun. He’d moved the previous year, when the extra money from his advertising salary made him feel a little better about living on his own. It wasn’t that he couldn’t have afforded it before, plenty of people he knew lived in studios alone and paid rent on time without worry, but once again, the buffer. There was a larger one with RKS, so he finally moved a couple blocks away to an apartment with a real view and a real bedroom. He’d never been prouder of anything in his life than that view. It was the sort of thing people admired within seconds of crossing the threshold. He didn’t have much stuff, but oh, did he ever have light. “Oh my god,” they’d always say, followed by either “Your light!” “Your windows!” “Your view!” or “Your apartment!” He melted at their inevitable use of the possessive. To them, the light was his. The windows were his. The version of New York down in the street below, his. He wrapped himself up in their compliments every time, despite knowing they weren’t really complimenting him but his city. No matter, it still made him feel like he’d made the right decision. He’d grown up in southern Ohio, surrounded by trees and brush, inside a tense and silent home where all the light was filtered through leaves whose fluttering made the air seem like it was simmering. Thanks to his parents, it often was.
Cake. He turned on the oven. He opened the box of Duncan Hines yellow cake mix he’d placed there before leaving in the morning and dumped its contents into the adjacent bowl. Eggs, oil, water. Stir, stir, stir. Spray both pans. Divide them as evenly as possible. Pop them into the oven, which wasn’t quite preheated but close enough. He set an egg timer for forty minutes and ran into the bathroom to shower. Getting ready took longer than he’d anticipated, as he couldn’t decide what to wear. This would have been easier if Kimberly were already here, he thought. Instead, he was just trying on outfit after outfit, staring at himself in the floor-length mirror nailed to his bedroom door as he contorted his body into all the awkward ways it managed to move, especially during a night out drinking, hoping it would look somewhat appealing in at least one of them. He was in black jeans and a white tank top when he took the first alarming sniff. There was no time to decide on a shirt; something was burning. Not just one thing, actually, but two.
He cracked the oven door just as the door to his apartment burst open.
Artie screamed “FUCK” as Kimberly screamed “HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” a shrieking harmony of thrill layered upon terror, fit for a thirtieth birthday.
“What’s wrong?” Kimberly asked.
“I burned the fucking cake! The timer didn’t go off! I set it! I remember setting it and literally saying aloud, ‘I’m setting the timer,’ so I wouldn’t worry about not setting it! Why the fuck didn’t it go off! Nothing ever fucking works.”
“Maybe it’s salvageable,” Kimberly said as she walked into the cramped galley kitchen where Artie was still pacing in small circles, though a quick look at the charred, smoking round made her grimace. She was about Artie’s height but broader, with powerful thighs, typically covered in short shorts, and a forceful chest, typically covered by a tucked-in button-down shirt containing a pack of cigarettes—the bulge of the pack adding a sort of finishing touch to her look. “OK, maybe not.”
Artie tossed the second pan onto the stove, and Kimberly jumped at the clash of hot metal on hot metal.
“I fucking ruined them,” he said, seeming to forget his friend’s presence. “Of course I fucking ruined them. That’s got to be a sign.”
“A sign of what?”
“That this year is going to be cursed.”
“Don’t be stupid. We’ll go out and buy you a cake. Or we can ask the waiter to pop a candle into a soup dumpling. The whole restaurant will sing!”
“I know it’s fine and I know I’m being dramatic, but,” Artie said, “you know.”
“You had a plan and it went to shit, I know,” Kimberly said.
“I didn’t say it. You did.”
“Of course I did.” She extended her arms and turned her mouth into a big, theatrical frown. “Would a birthday hug make it all feel better?”
“I guess.”
He hugged her, feeling the expected gentle press on her cigarettes, and it did.
“I hate it in here now. I don’t even want to celebrate anymore. It smells like failure.”
Kimberly turned her wrist and checked her watch with the theatricality of someone performing for the cheap seats. “Just so you know, you only get five more hours of this moping. Painfully depressive Artie needs to go back in hiding when the clock strikes midnight.”
“At least give me until last call.”
“Tonight is going to be fun,” she said, rubbing his back. “I promise.”
They’d just sat down in the living room with a pair of gentle sighs when a knock on the door startled them both, and they turned to watch Adam, in his leather bomber jacket and black jeans, looking like Tom of Finland visited an electrolysis center, step inside without waiting for an invitation. He was a boyish hunk, the friend who invited the most attention from strangers anytime they ventured out as a group, as well as the one who tended to disappear without saying goodbye. But Adam always put Kimberly and Artie first, even if plenty of others were in his social queue, and the three of them were mulling about in his apartment by 7:10, more or less on time. Artie appreciated their punctuality and recognized it as a kind of birthday gift. On any other Friday he could be waiting an hour or two for his friends to be where they said they’d be.
“Happy birthday, fag,” Adam said, leaning in for a hug. “Did you burn something?”
“We’re not talking about that,” Kimberly said, bolting up from the couch as if the springs in the cushion suddenly decided they didn’t want her there. “Shall we eat?”
“Yes,” Artie said. “Where are we thinking?”
“It’s your birthday,” Adam said, already at the door, the burnt smell already a distant memory. “If you lead, we will follow.”
They marched down the stairs and onto Bank Street. The air was ten degrees cooler than it had been when Artie got home, a welcome tease of brisk, newly autumnal air that wouldn’t come in with full force for another month. Artie took a confident right toward 7th Avenue, as if he knew where they were going, and his friends followed without question.
Kimberly tapped him on the shoulder with a pack of Parliaments, and Artie took one with a wordless nod. He pulled a brown lighter out of his pants and lit the end, the hit of nicotine instantly dissolving his anxiety over the burnt cake. He looked south down the avenue at all the lights and signs and people, electrified by the very thought of being among such brightness and bustle. Inhale. Exhale.
He remembered the first time they’d all eaten dinner together, five years before, when he still shared an apartment with Waylon. Adam had arrived the previous night, after meeting Way at the bar where he worked, and though they never had sex again, Adam quite liked hanging around that peculiar man and his kind, interesting friends. When Kimberly came by to watch Roseanne, she didn’t ask any questions about Adam’s presence, only whether Chinese food would be OK with everyone. When they all took their seats around the coffee table, topped with several cartons of food, Artie saw the living room as complete. He and Way had lived in that apartment for over a year by that point, but it hadn’t felt like home until that night.
After Artie’s birthday dinner at Shanghai Lee, which was served fast and eaten even faster, Kimberly lit another cigarette on the sidewalk outside and said what all of them were thinking. “Julius’?
“I thought you’d want to take us to the Cubby Hole.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you boys tonight.”
“I could do Julius’. Maybe dancing after?”
“Maybe. One step at a time.”
“Oh shit,” Kim said, biting down on the tip of the Parliament and speaking through gritted teeth. “Since there’s no unburnt cake at your apartment, where should we trek for dessert?”
“I’m over cake,” Artie said. “Let’s just go to the bar.”
