“ ‘Used to hate to leave me.’ ” I couldn’t help it.
“ ‘Now after lovin’ me late at night.’ ” We laughed. He could still hit the high notes. All the nights we’d sat on our beds with a beer and let our minds wander together like this. It wasn’t like talking. It was effortless. Desultorating, I used to call it. Could he just slip back into that without an apology? Would I let him?
“Or,” I said, “you could just go over there and fuck her yourself.”
His eyebrows twitched down and quickly up. He wasn’t going to show me his surprise at my bitterness. “I could indeed.” He drained his drink. I felt him trying to think of something witty to add. At that moment, I felt like he couldn’t have a thought or an impulse I couldn’t anticipate.
“Do you travel for work?” he asked.
“No. Never.” He didn’t know what I did. “Clearly you do.”
“Not as much as they want me to. It’s not worth the battles at home when I come back. Gail is such a bean counter. A trip like this and I lose any possibility of an hour to myself for the next three weekends.”
I didn’t want to hear about Gail. I had given him the chance to defect. “So what do you do with an hour to yourself?”
“I don’t know. It’s all hypothetical. There is no free time. We’ve got three kids and a fixer-upper we never fixed up so I’m just managing the chaos dawn to dusk. Hardware store, pharmacy, soccer game. Repeat.”
The bartender finally noticed me and came over. We knew each other from a party but neither of us acknowledged it and it created a tension Paul picked up on.
“What was that about?”
“What?”
“That little”—he rubbed his fingers together— “frisson.”
“There was no frisson.”
“There was a frisson. I know a frisson when I feel one.”
“You might have felt a frisson. I was just ordering a Campari.”
“A Campari. Is that some sort of code?”
“Code for what?”
“You know, a way to tell the bartender you’re gay.”
I stood up.
“Sit down,” he said in a bored stentorian voice he must use with his kids.
“You owe me an apology, not further insult.”
I saw his face flinch into an imitation and then flatten back out. I wondered if he did that to his kids, mimic them, the way my father had mimicked me. It was the first time I’d recognized the similarity between Paul and my father.
I should have left then.
But he said, “I do owe you an apology.” And I sat, to wait for it.
We moved to a booth for dinner. We didn’t switch to wine. He stayed with his single malts on the rocks, and I moved to flavored martinis. Neither of us had been very committed drinkers in college so the steady rate of his drink orders surprised me, as did my own insistence on keeping up with him. I had the sense that we were hurrying somewhere, having to get in our last meal and our last drink before we went, though for the longest time, idiot that I was, I didn’t know where we were going.
We desulterated through the appetizers, horrible crab clusters covered in some sort of bark and fried to black. They inspired thoughts on food in New England—he lived in Cincinnati now—and between the two of us we recalled nearly every dish at the Boston College dining hall: the Welsh rarebit, the American chop suey, the pink sponge cake.
The waiter brought the entrees: osso buco, grilled salmon. I was full, buzzed, tired. My initial nervousness had collapsed into a heavy fatigue, laced with fear. I couldn’t understand the fear, though I knew it had to do with the change in him. But I was used to changes. One of my brothers had recently lost over two hundred pounds, two close friends had had sex changes, and my mother, after my father’s death, returned to college and became a large animal veterinarian. On her website she was listed as a stud service specialist. All Paul had done was become beefier and disillusioned—who hadn’t?
“After you called that time, and told me, you know, what you told me,” he said, and I didn’t correct him about who had called whom, which was hard for me because I like people to tell stories accurately, “I must have spent a year just sifting through every memory I had of us. Shit, we went camping. We shared that foldout couch at my mom’s apartment, showers, bathrooms. You had girlfriends! That little Carla or Carlie who was so in love with you. And that other one, began with a b. And didn’t you have something going with Anna at my wedding? God, when I told Gail she was like, ‘No shit, Sherlock,’ but I tell you, I never saw it. You are one good performance artist.”