spent most of the dinner talking intently to Philip Shailes on my left, who was the most boring person in our class, and who was telling me how he was planning to buy all his lamps and blankets at Bed Bath & Beyond now because they always jacked up the prices in August.
This was the kind of dinner where people drift away from the table as soon as the food is done to sit with their actual friends or to have heartfelt conversations with people they’ll never see again. So there were a couple of minutes after the last of our table-mates had stood up, when Thomas and I were left alone. We looked at each other like a deer and a hunter, but I’m not sure who was who. Looking directly at him for the first time in a while, I could see that his skin was less delicate than it had been; now there was stubble on his chin and above his lip. He wore a light blue shirt and black pants that Sally must have bought him for graduation. “So,” he said, “how’re the wife and kids?”
“Oh, good, good. Yours?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain. Actually,” he said, breaking into his normal voice, “can complain pretty easily.”
I nodded.
Thomas and I, who’d seen each other naked in the aquatic center locker room, who’d woken up a hundred times on side-by-side mattresses, who shared a secret more serious than any married couple … now we were awkward together. Awkwardness is like crabgrass: leave anything, anything at all,untended for long enough and it will grow until you can’t see the concrete underneath.
“I heard you got into Penn,” he said.
“Yup. You’re going to Columbia?”
“Yup. Maybe you’ll come to New York some weekend.”
I nodded and shrugged.
“This has really been the Arc of all Arc de Triomphes, huh?” he said.
I nodded and did something with my face that looked like a smile but that said:
Don’t try it, we’re done, it’s too late
.
He leaned away from the table in a way that meant he was about to stand up, but before he did he pulled a pen out of his pocket (one of the same blue pens that Richard always used on my English papers) and, on the bottom edge of my “A Banquet Under the Stars” program, he wrote two things:
Gut-bomb
(which is what we’d used to sometimes say instead of good-bye); and, underneath that, in smaller writing:
Remember Owl Creek
. And then (did he smirk?) he was up and out of the tent, off to the bathroom to congratulate himself on having gotten through to me.
And he had, for a few minutes at least. I felt like I’d swallowed the point of his pen.
Sometimes as an adult I’ll see one of those garbage trucks that they send out for special pickups, the ones with giant compactors built into their backs; they go around grabbing and crushing things like couches and car bumpers and wooden banisters, little landfills on wheels. And I always think, when I’m watching one work its way down the street,
No way, not that, it couldn’t just swallow that
, but then it does, gulping down the refrigerator or whatever with just a little pause, and then off it goes.
There would have been about a dozen points, if you’d come to me when I was twelve, when I’d just arrived at Dupont with my green braces and my Redskins hat, and told me all the things that would happen over the next few years, when Iwould have said,
No, I won’t be able to handle that. Sorry, I’ll have to die
. But I could handle it, as it turned out, or I could live with it, or anyway I could live with it so far.
I tore off the bottom strip of my program, ripped the strip into confetti, and dropped the confetti into my water glass, and, before I got up to check if all the cake was gone, I dumped the whole mess in the grass under my chair.
I did finally write to Thomas, not the night of Sally’s email but the one after. There are limits, it turns out, to how much guilt even I can cart around.
From:
To:
Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 11:14 PM
Subject: ahoy-hoy
Hey.
This was the kind of dinner where people drift away from the table as soon as the food is done to sit with their actual friends or to have heartfelt conversations with people they’ll never see again. So there were a couple of minutes after the last of our table-mates had stood up, when Thomas and I were left alone. We looked at each other like a deer and a hunter, but I’m not sure who was who. Looking directly at him for the first time in a while, I could see that his skin was less delicate than it had been; now there was stubble on his chin and above his lip. He wore a light blue shirt and black pants that Sally must have bought him for graduation. “So,” he said, “how’re the wife and kids?”
“Oh, good, good. Yours?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain. Actually,” he said, breaking into his normal voice, “can complain pretty easily.”
I nodded.
Thomas and I, who’d seen each other naked in the aquatic center locker room, who’d woken up a hundred times on side-by-side mattresses, who shared a secret more serious than any married couple … now we were awkward together. Awkwardness is like crabgrass: leave anything, anything at all,untended for long enough and it will grow until you can’t see the concrete underneath.
“I heard you got into Penn,” he said.
“Yup. You’re going to Columbia?”
“Yup. Maybe you’ll come to New York some weekend.”
I nodded and shrugged.
“This has really been the Arc of all Arc de Triomphes, huh?” he said.
I nodded and did something with my face that looked like a smile but that said:
Don’t try it, we’re done, it’s too late
.
He leaned away from the table in a way that meant he was about to stand up, but before he did he pulled a pen out of his pocket (one of the same blue pens that Richard always used on my English papers) and, on the bottom edge of my “A Banquet Under the Stars” program, he wrote two things:
Gut-bomb
(which is what we’d used to sometimes say instead of good-bye); and, underneath that, in smaller writing:
Remember Owl Creek
. And then (did he smirk?) he was up and out of the tent, off to the bathroom to congratulate himself on having gotten through to me.
And he had, for a few minutes at least. I felt like I’d swallowed the point of his pen.
Sometimes as an adult I’ll see one of those garbage trucks that they send out for special pickups, the ones with giant compactors built into their backs; they go around grabbing and crushing things like couches and car bumpers and wooden banisters, little landfills on wheels. And I always think, when I’m watching one work its way down the street,
No way, not that, it couldn’t just swallow that
, but then it does, gulping down the refrigerator or whatever with just a little pause, and then off it goes.
There would have been about a dozen points, if you’d come to me when I was twelve, when I’d just arrived at Dupont with my green braces and my Redskins hat, and told me all the things that would happen over the next few years, when Iwould have said,
No, I won’t be able to handle that. Sorry, I’ll have to die
. But I could handle it, as it turned out, or I could live with it, or anyway I could live with it so far.
I tore off the bottom strip of my program, ripped the strip into confetti, and dropped the confetti into my water glass, and, before I got up to check if all the cake was gone, I dumped the whole mess in the grass under my chair.
I did finally write to Thomas, not the night of Sally’s email but the one after. There are limits, it turns out, to how much guilt even I can cart around.
From:
To:
Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 11:14 PM
Subject: ahoy-hoy
Hey.
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