Sometimes Cynthia asked me what we talked about when we got together and played our rounds of golf. She must have imagined us on the course baring our souls, the game primarily an occasion for the talk of old friends. But it wasn’t that way. We talked, but mostly we golfed. Conversation tended to center around the previous shot, the next hole. Which club to use, which way the green might break. At night, over steaks, we’d reminisce. We had a deep well of stories from which to draw. But weightier conversation felt almost like an intrusion, business to be gotten through.
And yet tonight, as I ate my chicken cacciatore and drank my wine, I was thinking that even long-standing friendships required periodic injections of the now. At one time, we had all taken classes together and lived in the same dormitories, drunk from the same kegs and vomited on the same lawns. Our lives were led in close proximity, and we knew one another as only friends living together do. And while we liked to believe that our shared past was the anchor from which we could drift only so far, the truth was that each of us had changed. Maybe even a lot. And this should have been cause for celebration. It meant that we’d grown up. But to acknowledge this, to announce, “Look at me! Look who I’ve become!” would have been to disappoint everyone somehow, to destroy the illusion that we knew one another as well now as we once did.
The funny thing was, Cynthia wouldn’t have liked me when I was twenty. Twenty-year-old Will was too raw, too desperate for everything: love, success, and confirmation that all his choices were the right ones. Probably we were all a little wiser now, a little more complicated. All of which is to say, I felt grateful for our new business partnership. Our friendships were secure to the degree that we all trusted in the past’s strong anchor. But here, finally, was something new to bind us together, something in the present that had us looking to the future.
I proposed a toast.
“To what?” Jeffrey asked.
“To your fat pregnant wives,” Nolan said. “And to Will’s new business.”
I raised my glass. “To old friends.”
Leaving the restaurant, full from dinner, I thought about the phone call I’d make on Monday to Fred McPhee, my ex-bandmate, offering his new band a record contract. I loved knowing that I could help him reach a level of success that we—High Noon—might have had, if it hadn’t been for Gwen’s death. And for a moment, I could imagine it was all already happening: the record was made, rave reviews were being published. Songs I’d recorded and Cynthia had promoted were being bought and reviewed and downloaded and talked about.
And maybe—to continue the fantasy—we’d make enough money where, after some time, Cynthia and I could buy a home after all, a slightly larger place where we would raise our child.
Nolan asked me if I planned to give Cynthia the news about Long-Shot Records on the phone tonight or surprise her with it on Sunday. But this was no decision at all: I would tell her as soon as I heard her voice.
Looking back, I’m glad I allowed myself that fantasy. Glad to have indulged in that much hope—because within the hour, everything would change.
It started at the golf range, where the three of us stood on adjacent AstroTurf mats, driving our golf balls into the dark, misty field. Despite the earlier sun, it’d begun to drizzle, and thunder rumbled in the distance as we settled into the rhythm of our swings. After hitting a dozen or so balls, I happened to glance up at Jeffrey, who was standing to my left. I’m a lefty, and Jeffrey’s a righty, so we were facing each other. He stood over his ball as if he were about to take a swing. But the backswing didn’t come. He just stood there, head down, holding the club. At some point he must have sensed me watching him, because he looked up.
“Hey, Will?” he said quietly.
I raised my eyebrows in response.
More silence. Then, in the careful voice of a physician making a grave diagnosis, he said, “She’s cheating on me again.”
Before I could think of a suitable reply, he looked down, brought his club back, and swung. The ball went so high that I lost it in the grayness overhead. To my eyes, never good at twilight, it simply shrank into the sky and was gone.
On the drive home, Jeffrey was being very quiet. But as we approached the little shopping center across from the entrance to my neighborhood, he said, “Pull in there.” He wanted to buy antacids at the Milk-n-Bread. “My stomach’s been killing me lately. Stress.”
“Stress?” Nolan said. “It was the clams.”
In a few hours Newfield would be placid again, but at 7:15 the Friday rush was still in full swing and traffic in the westbound lane was bumper to bumper. “For real?” I asked.
“Trust me—you need to stop.”