The Stranger's Thanksgiving

The orange and purple of the faintest glimpse of twilight had only just begun to creep over the eastern sky outside my window when I awoke. Truly, a magical thing. It’s as though God, the great painter of the world, has made a yellowish brushstroke just at the flat plain at the edge of the world, blending it in with the inky blackness of the pure night sky with a single masterful swipe. 

You’d think I was weird, of course, if I told you that I awoke this early of my own volition, on Sunday of all days. In fact, I set my alarm this early for a very particular reason: silence. 

If this were summer, the early birds would have been awake and chirping up a mess. On a snowy day, the plows would have been out scraping against the road. Now, in late Autumn, there was nothing. Even the wind seemed scared to speak, whispering against the edges of my windows and the solidness of my house. My master bedroom is large; an Alaskan King, on which I sleep alone, does not dominate the space. 

I turn the taps on only a fraction, just enough water to wash my mouth and face without making undue noise. Maybe I’m scared of it, maybe I relish it. Regardless, this day, of all days, the silence is driven home to my heart. 

Why this day? It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving. In spite of my lack of familial attachment in my large home, my house is the focal point for an extended family’s Thanksgiving. Cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and all manner of spouses and children flood into my house at various points in the week, all of my own invitation, and they take each one of the ten bedrooms, some kip out on one of the two dozen or so couches, a few of which fold into beds themselves, and yet others, mostly children, are happy to sleep on air mattresses in enclosed rooms far from the prying eyes of their parents. Often on a nighttime stroll last week I saw the lights of phones and handheld video game devices lighting up a tiny face like a spotlight. They’re all rather cute. They look mortified when they see me; I can walk quite softly when I wish, but I just smile at them and make it clear that I’m not going to call their parents. As you can imagine, the kids love me. 

A sigh from my lungs hits my ears hard. I begin to pad down the long curved staircase connecting my landing to the second floor. In my house, I hear nothing. I can’t tell if I like it or not; I never have been able to make that distinction. It simply fascinates me. The stillness. The bald lack. 

A week before Thanksgiving, I host Friends-giving. All my friends from college, high school, and some from later in life troop into my house for a week of what was once unbridled hedonism and partying but which has now, in our middle aged glory, turned into nights of cognac and sitting in soft armchairs, reminiscing over past days. Their families come too, of course, which was the initial factor that turned our Autumn “spring-breaks” into more civilized nights of banter. I’m happy for it. Those weeks were getting exhausting, particularly as they unfortunately fell as a prelude to Thanksgiving itself, a week in which hosting heavily taxed my health.

On the second floor, I peer into every bedroom, into every living room, into every powder room and closet. Not out of paranoia, as though I expect to find a stowaway, but out of curiosity. How can a place once so filled to the brim with people now become so vacuous? 

The first floor, the most expansive floor, has me put on fur slippers. I find in them that I can be almost more stealthy than on the plush carpet of my upper levels. Again, I don’t find a single soul present. Once, many years ago, my sister left her dog here by “accident”. In truth, she hated the thing, and after an slobbery and unpleasant start to my own Sunday ritual, I couldn’t blame her. But now, no dog barked, no tail wagged from around a corner. I went into the kitchen, the indoor kitchen, and took the required 300 steps to make coffee. It’s a fancy machine, but it runs whisper quiet. Just the way I’d want it on this day. 

I suppose you’re wondering a bit about me. Like, why do I have this giant house? Where are my own spouse and kids? My ways are probably quaint to you. I must seem like an old man on the verge of senility. 

Well, I’ll answer as I watch the curls of bitter steam whisk their way above the dark liquid in my mug, reflecting patterns of heat and wind that cannot be detected by my humble human senses. 

My own attempts at beginning a family ended before they began. I was quite the ambitious person in my twenties. I ran the board of a small company, I found time to be an amateur novelist and bodybuilder, and I even had an online store under my management. I worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, every day, on these various things. You can see how my relationships would have suffered. 

And I wish I could say there was some meditative bliss which carried me through all those thick cobwebs of corporate life, art, and entrepreneurship. Instead, all I can point to is the darkness which pervaded me during that time. I worked towards an ideal, towards being all that I could be, and when my online store began selling six figures of products a month and my company IPO’d for 10 billion dollars, I felt as though I had nothing in my future but the time to settle down and find someone I loved. 

Yet life wouldn’t let me alone. I found myself utterly unequipped to get in romantic relationships. I had just missed too much time. I was thirty-six, rapidly nearing the wrong side of forty, with no past experience. I ironically felt like I was applying for jobs, something I had never done before. Would you, if you were running a company, accept an application from a mid-thirties candidate with no experience? 

To make matters worse, my books started selling, and selling fast. I now had a team of money-managers taking care of the mindless stacks of figurative bills I placed in front of them. I bought this house for nearly fifty million dollars. It wasn’t even a drop in the water. 

Towards my family, I was already somewhat estranged. They understood, I think, that I was never going to be a normal person; they knew that I couldn’t be satisfied doing nothing. And so it was, even after my biggest successes, my drive, or perhaps my fear, continued to propel me upwards. Now, my coffee is imported from Colombia. My wine comes straight from the vineyards of France, England, Italy, and as far as Australia with no middle-man. I buy paintings more expensive than my first car and don’t break a sweat when one of my small relatives scribbles on it with crayon. 

I don’t mean to say that to brag, although you might not believe me. In exchange for all of these things, I have given my soul, or at least the chance to find the other half of my soul. I watch my sister with her husband and wonder what that’s like. I have an assistant and a global concierge service, but they merely do what I tell them to do. What must it feel like to have your request denied? What’s it like to have someone argue with you like they love you? 

It’s too early for breakfast, so I go over to one of my living rooms, near the kitchen. Floor to ceiling windows show me a view out over a lake, the other side of which is slowly lightening with the approaching dawn. I love it. I open the sliding door and step outside, leaving my slippers and exposing my toasty feet to the cold wood of my patio. 

In this solitude, in this snowflake of time, the gentle trickle of the waterfall in my koi pond sounds like the Godly Amazon River emptying into the Atlantic. My own pool has seen its last use already; a cover lies over it, but the lights within peak out of the edges with an ethereal blue outline, intermingled with mist rising up from the surface. The hot tub I will still use, so it lies uncovered, white lights within glowing upwards as though in harmony with the moon. 

The ring of trees which ends roughly halfway down the either side of the lake holds nothing but thin, bare branches floating gently in what I realize is a growing breeze. I go back inside and close the door behind me, my formerly chilly house seeming like an oasis of heat after the outdoors. 

I bring my coffee over to my Steinway, sitting in the nearest parlor. I’ve got a few of them, and a few custom pianos that I had designed and decorated by some of the world’s leading artists, but this one was my first. Its keys are almost still warm with the touch of my fingers from two nights prior, when I had my entire extended family in this very room, singing songs together and filling the halls of my empty house with unparalleled music, its yearly sacrament. 

Now, I place my coffee on a little table nearby, a coaster underneath, of course, and I begin playing Moonlight Sonata, all three movements. I know it’s overplayed, but I cannot help but feel every note as my fingers strike the keys, and they resonate with me like no other song. 

In a few hours time, I’ll start getting calls from all over the country. People returning to their own homes, tired from late-night flights and perhaps even hassled by their children will call to thank me for hosting another Thanksgiving. I can already picture how the conversation goes; I’ve only had it about a hundred times in the past decade. 

They’ll say we should get together more often, but then they say that they want a smaller, family affair for Christmas. Maybe they’re intimidated by me, maybe they don’t want to impose, maybe they just hate me. I can’t say. 

After some time, I switch to playing some Chopin. I love the way the piano sounds in the pre-dawn silence, each note breaking the haunting tension left by its predecessor. But it does bore me after a while. I’ve shot so many interviews next to this piano. After I put down the cover over the keys, I look to my right, where so often has sat a reporter in an armchair, glaring lights on them as well as me as they look to me with that piercing look so unbecoming of a human but without which a journalist seemingly cannot be taken seriously. No reporters today, though, nor in the last year. I like that, but now I sort of wish I had one around. 

It’s proper dawn now. Time for breakfast. I’ve eaten the same thing every Sunday for the past thirty or so years. Protein pancakes with blueberries and two sunny-side up eggs, heavily seasoned. A couple tricks with the eggs. First, try using steam. Once the eggs are sizzling in the pan, take just a teaspoon or so of water and throw it in, quickly covering the eggs to let the steam cook those difficult top-whites without searing the yolk. But before you do that, season your eggs generously. That way, everything cooks together. I like to add my salt first, then some freshly ground black pepper, some red pepper flakes, some dried oregano, garlic powder, and even just a bit of fresh thyme occasionally. The result is a flavorful sunny-side up egg that makes an excellent prelude to the sweet pancakes. 

I always choose real maple syrup over any low-calorie or cheap alternative. Those are far too processed, and I just want a single ingredient on the back of my label. 

I sat down to eat my breakfast at the marble island in my kitchen. I should mention that I haven’t turned on any lights in my house. It’s all dark, and I like it like that. The only light comes from the steady release of twilight, the sun injecting itself slowly over the capillaries of cirrus clouds in the high atmosphere. By now, the sky is fully purple, and a pinkish hue falls through my large windows. 

While eating, I start to think about the rest of my life. What’s ahead of me? What’s left far behind. It seems companionship is not for me, no matter how hard I try to make it so. Have I tried my hardest? I hardly think so. But only God knows if I’m destined to leave this quiet comfort zone. Am I just destined to host these gatherings once a year? I tell everyone how thankful I am for them, and they tell me the same thing, but then they go about their normal day to day lives and I sit back in my manion, surrounded by the objects of my ambition, the fortune of my mind, and I find my heart aching such that no piano melody may assuage it, or even strike the same precise tune. 

Of course, I am thankful for my family, and to be fair to them, my schedule is quite forbidding to any sort of visits. I’m either running back and forth to Manhattan for meetings about my online marketplace or back and forth to LA to reach my agents or publishing companies about new deals. They’re saying one of my books is being looked at by a renowned director - I can’t say who, for a movie starting production next year. They’re wondering how I feel about handing over the IP to the studio. 

I suppose my parents would be as ambivalent about my present situation as I am. They always wanted the best for me, and so to see me with enough money to send a hundred thousand dollars back to my various extended-extended family members back in India every year must be thrilling, but what about those days when I walk around the empty halls of my house? I used to dream of being able to read all day, but now, when I actually can and do pick up books in the morning and continue reading them all throughout the day until night well and truly falls and I’m left with a little puddle of light from my automatic lamps as the only brightness in my otherwise barren house, I find the fear of another 12 hours passing without my interference to be so suffocating that I sometimes break down in that very armchair. How many more of those 12 hour increments do I have? How many more are bound to be spent alone. 

And of course you’re thinking that I’m rich and I can have anyone I want. I could be in a relationship with any number of celebrities, and in fact I do have conversations with models and actresses and all manner of other beautiful women, usually over text, but one of two things happens: either they abandon the messaging for reasons I cannot decipher, or I lose interest and break it off with them before it begins. It’s maddening. I’ve almost stopped trying. 

Oh, and woe is me, of course. I understand my own blessings, and I’m debilitated sometimes by the irony and the paradox of it. Many people would use the power of going back thirty years to tell themselves the very things I embodied throughout my young life in hopes of obtaining what I have now. If I could go back thirty years, I would tell myself that I should talk to that girl sitting next to me in Finance 400 senior year. It may have derailed my life in just the right way. 

I sigh again, this time the sound not so deafening. The morning has almost passed, the stillness now but a memory of what it once was. Perhaps a walk is in order today. I own all of the land around the lake, including these extensive woods. I could go on a hike and lose myself in nature. But I’ve hiked all of these trails, I know every tree personally. We’re all friends. As I’m thinking about the day, I feel my phone ring in my pocket. 

“Hello?” 

“Hey, hope I didn’t wake you.” It’s my sister, and she sounds happy. 

I huff a little and reply, “You know my routine by now.” 

“Yeah, yeah… Well listen, thanks again for hosting Thanksgiving. It was a blast.” 

“You’re welcome.” The words sound hollow in my own throat. 

There’s a pause. I don’t know what else she wants. Usually our conversation ends around here. Not that we’re distant, but there’s just… nothing else to talk about. I’m about to hang up when she pipes, “I know you’re probably gonna hate this, but I was thinking… I’ve got a friend, single, beautiful, and she’d love to get to know you. Could I… set you two up?” 

I’m floored. My immediate reaction is a firm no, but for some reason, perhaps Divine Intervention, my lips say, “Yeah, sounds good.” 

“Really?” she sounds surprised herself. “Alright, well I’ll tell her and let you know a time and date.” 

“Cool.” 

She’s used to my tacit dialogue. “Alright, thanks again. Bye.” 

I hang up the phone, a weird sort of smile alighting on my face. I return mechanically to my piano and start playing Ode to Joy.