Playworld, p.1
Playworld, page 1
Also by Adam Ross
Mr. Peanut
Ladies and Gentlemen
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2025 by Adam Ross
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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Music for permission to reprint lyrics from “How High the Moon,” lyrics by Nancy Hamilton, music by Morgan Lewis. © 1940 (Renewed) Chappell & Co., Inc., lyrics from “Amsterdam,” words and music by Jacques Brel, English words by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman. © 1968 (Renewed) Pouchenel, Editions, and Mort Shuman Songs. All rights for Pouchenel, Editions administered by Unichappell Music, Inc. All rights for Mort Shuman songs administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp., and lyrics from “If We only Have Love,” English lyrics by Mort Shuman, Music by Jacques Brel. © 1968 (Renewed) Unichappell Music, Inc., Mort Shuman Songs and Romantic Music Corp. All rights for Mort Shuman Songs administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ross, Adam, [date]- author.
Title: Playworld : a novel / Adam Ross.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023048923 (print) | LCCN 2023048924 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385351294 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385351300 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3618.O84515 P53 2025 (print) | LCC PS3618.O84515 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20231018
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048923
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048924
Ebook ISBN 9780385351300
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph by Adrian Samson/Trunk Archive
Cover design by Oliver Munday
Griffynweld map design by David Lindroth
Frontispiece photograph by Steven Sebring
ep_prh_7.1a_149802300_c0_r0
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: The Carter Administration
A Crisis of Confidence
Voiceover
The October Surprise
Half Day
The Fifty-Minute Hour
The Agony of Defeat
Double Fantasy
The Twelve Days of Christmas
Hostages
Part Two: The Reagan Administration
The Swimsuit Issue
Rawhide Down
Take Two
Dungeons & Dragons
There Is No Try
Voiceover
Charles and Diana
Union Buster
Video Killed the Radio Star
Morning in America
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
_149802300_
To my mother, father, and brother
Prologue
In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.
Two decades later, when I finally told my mother—we were on Long Island, taking a walk on the beach—she stopped, stunned, and said, “But she was such an ugly woman.” The remark wasn’t as petty as it sounds. If I was aware of it then, it neither repulsed me nor affected my feelings for Naomi. It was just a thing I took for granted, like the color of her hair.
Wiry and ashen, it had the shading but not the shimmer of pigeon feathers. Naomi kept it long, so that it fell past her shoulders. I knew it by touch, for my face was often buried in it. Only later did I wonder if she considered herself unattractive, because she always wore sunglasses, as if to hide her face, large gold frames with blue-tinted prescription lenses. When we were driving together, which was often that year, she’d allow these to slide down her nose and then look at me over their bridge. She might’ve considered this pose winning, but it was more likely to see me better. Her mouth often hung slightly open. Her lower teeth were uneven, and her tongue, which pressed against them, always tasted of coffee.
Naomi’s car was a silver Mercedes sedan—300SD along with Turbo Diesel nickel-plated on the back—that made a deep hum when she drove. The interior, enormous in my mind’s eye, was tricked out with glossy wood paneling and white leather, back seat so wide and legroom so ample they made the driver appear to be far away. It was in this car that Naomi and I talked most often. We’d park, and then she’d lean across the armrest to press her cheek to mine, and I’d sometimes allow her to kiss me. Other times we’d move to the back. Lying there with Naomi, her nose nuzzled to my neck, I’d stare at the ceiling’s dotted fabric until the pattern seemed to detach and drift like a starred sky. This car was her prized possession, and like many commuters, she had turned the machine into an extension of her body. Her left thumb lightly hooked the wheel at eight o’clock when traffic was moving, her fingertips sliding to eleven when it was slow. She preferred to sit slightly reclined, her free hand spread on her inner thigh, though after she lost her pinkie the following summer, and even after being fitted with a prosthesis, she kept it tucked away.
“I was worried you’d think it was disgusting,” she said, the digit hidden between the seat and her hip. She’d bought herself a diamond ring to hide the seam, and for the most part the likeness was uncanny, but at certain angles you could tell—the cuticle’s line was too smooth, the nail’s pale crescent too creamy to match the others. Like my father’s fake teeth, which he occasionally left lying around our apartment, I was fascinated by it, though my curiosity wasn’t morbid. I was a child actor, you see, a student of all forms of dissembling, and had long ago found my greatest subject to be adults.
Part One
The
Carter
Administration
Politics is just like show business.
You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.
—Ronald Reagan
A Crisis of Confidence
We were at the fortieth wedding anniversary celebration of Dr. Barr and his wife, Lynn. The Barrs lived in Great Neck. We’d driven from Manhattan just before the sun was beginning to set. As we crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, Roosevelt Island’s towers flashed, the shadows of Manhattan’s buildings just starting to climb their faces. By the time we arrived the sky was a buffed pink, with plenty of light for my younger brother, Oren, to name the make and model of every car parked in the driveway, ending with Dr. Barr’s Cadillac Seville. It was a vehicle whose cachet we associated with the bold gilt letters on the door of his Gramercy Park office, but the high esteem in which we held him did not change the fact that in our house, and on nights like these, he was known only by his first name: Elliott.
He was my father’s best friend and our family’s psychologist. All of us consulted with him: Mom midweek, Dad and Oren and me on Saturday mornings. My father had been Elliott’s patient since before he met my mother; she, the year after they married. Oren had only recently started therapy because his grades were sliding, but I’d been seeing Elliott since I was six, after a family death I’d caused. It never struck me as odd, the thinness of the membrane between patient and friend, between husband and wife, brother and brother, perhaps because Elliott had been such a ubiquitous presence for as long as I could remember. If anything, it made Elliott seem even wiser, able, as I imagined he was, to keep so many secrets from four people without judging them.
The Barrs’ home was so packed with guests it made me feel like we were standing in a closet, the men’s blazers and the women’s wraps and scarves muffling the music as we moved through zones of perfume, Scotch, and cigarette smoke. Oren and I made repeat trips to the buffet (the salmon soon only a head and a tail), watched some of ABC’s Wide World of Sports in the guest room (Elliott had one of the biggest TVs I’d ever seen, but the reception was terrible), and then checked out Elliott’s collection of masks mounted in the dining room’s display case, whose glass Oren tried to open: arrow-headed shamans, saber-toothed Kabuki demons, and our favorites from the Chinese opera, their designs like superhero masks and as colorful as pi nball machines. But having exhausted ways of relieving our boredom, we split up.
This was when Naomi and I ended up alone together for the first time. She was sitting on the living room sofa. I sat on the coffee table, facing her. I was telling her about my acting career. She had asked me about playing Roy Scheider’s son in The Talon Effect.
“What was it like working with him?” she said.
“He was nice,” I said. “Roy and I ate lunch together my first day on the set, and when I opened my soda it sprayed his face, so he angled his can’s mouth toward mine, popped the tab, and got me back.”
“And Joan Collins,” she said. “Is she as pretty in person?”
“She is,” I said, “though one day during makeup the hairdresser stuck a teasing comb behind her ear and lifted a wig clean off her head.”
Naomi found this hysterical. She snorted when she laughed, pressing her fingernails to her chest. Between her rings and bracelets and her gold earrings shaped like cymbals, she clinked whenever she moved. She was a Great Neck Jewess. She had the classic up-Island accent, one I could mimic on command: “A vawhdville act, this kid is,” I said, imitating her, “a regular prawdigy.” She was wide-hipped; she wore sheer stockings beneath a wool skirt. Her blouse was a tailored silk, open at the neck, which revealed, when she leaned forward, a peek of collarbone and the lacy spray of her bra. On her cheek was a light brown birthmark, the texture and color of a burned egg white.
It was the heat of Naomi’s attention that got me so excited, plus the odd way we sat hidden in plain sight—how the party, by now well into its swing, domed us in a kind of privacy—because it was at this point that I did something remarkable and fateful: I got into character. She’d asked me about the Saturday morning TV series I’d been doing for several seasons, “the one,” she said, “that adults watch too.” She snapped her fingers, trying to conjure the title as if from the narrow space between us, and then laid her hand on my shoulder. “The Nuclear Family,” she said, remembering, and then leaned back to clap once. It was more spoof than superhero show, vaguely educational, each episode organized around a different scientific concept. An exposure to radiation had altered the DNA of my character, Peter Proton, along with that of his parents, Ellen Electron and Nate Neutron. Before we fought bad guys, we’d summon our powers by yelling, “Split up!” After Three Mile Island had nearly melted down, everyone called the show prophetic. Naomi wanted to know how we did the special effects—the atomic eye blasts and flying sequences. I was explaining chroma-keying to her, how we’d hang from wires in front of a green screen, when I suddenly stopped. My expression changed. I turned away and, through my nose, forced all the breath from my chest. It was a trick I’d learned in order to make myself tear up.
“Sweetie,” she asked, “are you all right?”
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” I said. “But you have to swear not to tell anyone.” I had a tear perfectly balanced—it was like palming a beach ball in the wind—and when I faced Naomi again, I let it fall down my cheek. “Will you swear?” I asked.
Naomi looked over her shoulder and then leaned forward and whispered, “Of course, honey.”
I told her that I’d lost my virginity to Liz, the director’s assistant. She was twenty-four. On set, she was everything from gofer to script girl, and because I was extra busy once school started—what with the tighter shooting schedule, I explained, and my homework on top of that—I’d struggled to memorize my lines. She and I often rehearsed together, and for several weeks straight we’d found ourselves alone in my dressing room. One night while going over a scene, it just happened. We’d been secretly dating ever since.
“She’s worried she’ll get in trouble,” I said.
“Because of your age, you mean?”
“You’re the first person I’ve told.”
Naomi shook her head in amazement.
“Is it wrong?” I asked.
“To be having…relations with her?” she said.
“To like older women so much.”
And while Naomi considered how to answer—struggling, through the fog of these details, to process my bald-faced lie—I leaned forward to kiss her. This was a ridiculous gesture, made more absurd by my open-mouthed, tongue-first nonchalance, plus my disregard for her status and our surroundings (the fact that she was married, for example, or that guests were standing five feet away). I briefly pressed my lips to hers. It’s possible she’d never moved so fast in her life, rocking back to laugh at my ludicrous bravado while simultaneously pressing her fingertips to my shoulder.
“Griffin,” she said, “you are something.”
I shrugged, then thanked her for the talk and went to go find my brother.
* * *
—
Oren was always worth seeking out at these parties, because he was a fearless explorer of other people’s rooms. Closed doors meant nothing to him. Closets were never off-limits. Bureaus begged to be opened, whether they belonged to strangers or to our parents, whose wall-length dresser he regularly raided with abandon. He’d found treasures there: rolls of quarters stacked like Lincoln Logs, reserved for the basement laundry machines but that we skimmed to play Missile Command at Stanley’s Stationery Store; my father’s dog tags, their gunmetal stamped with risen letters like Braille and revealing his given name, Hertzberg. (When Dad became an actor, he’d changed it to Hurt.) Buried beneath Mom’s underwear, Oren had also uncovered her diaphragm, waiting until I was present to pop its plastic container. He stretched its dome with his fingers to a near-porous transparency.
“I think it’s a yarmulke,” he theorized.
“For what,” I said, “the rain?” I sealed its ring over my lips and blew as hard as I could. “Plus,” I added after it failed to inflate, “Mom isn’t even Jewish.”
At the Barrs’ house, I found Oren in the twilit driveway with my father and Naomi’s husband, Sam Shah. One gull wing of his Bentley’s hood was raised so Oren could admire the engine. My father was already seated shotgun. When he spotted me, he made a hurry-up wave.
“Join us,” Sam said, clicking the hood’s panel back in place and walking toward the driver’s-side door. “We’re taking her for a spin.”
* * *
—
Sam Shah made a powerful impression standing beside his gorgeous machine. He was dark-skinned—Pakistani on his mother’s side, I’d learn later that year—with a head of luxuriant black hair that added at least an inch to his height. He was full-lipped, his fluffy mustache as dense as his brows, and his glasses had such thick lenses his eyes seemed to float in them. To use an expression from back then, his charisma was serious. Chin up, he watched me as I approached and then extended his arm toward the back seat. I always thought that Mr. Shah’s clothes were fantastic. This evening’s blazer was a buttery chestnut tweed, his silk tie brilliantly colored. His loafers’ tassels looked like tiny squid dipped in expensive chocolate. Shoes to shirt, these materials seemed to gather the fading light to them, as did the Bentley’s oyster-gray paint.
“Everyone buckled up?” Sam asked. He pulled on a pair of leather driving gloves, perforated above the clasp, which, when he snapped closed, I noticed my father admiring. Sam started the car and the needles jumped. He eased the Bentley out of its space, but the moment we were on the road he gave it gas, and the engine sang.
Oren was thrilled. He immediately pulled down the tray table—an act I copied—admiring the molten grain of polished walnut. Oren leaned forward, looking over Sam’s shoulder to regard the dash. The white-on-black gauges had stenciled abbreviations, the car’s major operations adjusted by silver knobs that looked pleasurable to touch. The only visible sign of wear surrounded the ignition switch, the key having chipped away the veneer each time it had missed the slot, but to me such scarring was a sign of use and meant only one thing: Sam drove this car everywhere.
“What’s the make and model?” my father asked.
