“I don’t know,” Nolan replied. “I thought I did.”
His father went in the direction his mother had gone, and then others left, too, and then a handful of us headed up to our defeated candidate’s suite to watch the TV news and finish off whatever wine hadn’t already been consumed. Our numbers dwindled. Nolan clicked off the TV.
I have nothing, he said, the melodrama of the inebriated. It’s all over for me.
“Sure, I remember,” I said to Jeffrey now. “Nolan got drunk and kicked us out of his hotel suite.”
I didn’t see him until the following morning. Jeffrey, Evan, and I were having breakfast at the hotel restaurant around eight o’clock when the elevator doors opened and out he came, looking uncharacteristically disheveled. No morning run. He came over and took the fourth seat. He picked up the menu and looked at it, though there was no need. Nolan always ate a bowl of oatmeal with a banana for breakfast.
The waitress came over. “Pancakes,” he said. “And a cheese omelet. And a Coke.”
“How’re you holding up?” I asked, when the waitress had gone away.
“My head is killing me.”
When the food came, he didn’t touch any of it. Just stirred the eggs around in his plate, sipped the Coke, then stood up and shook each of our hands. “I’m sorry, but I really need to get the hell out of here.” He dropped some bills on the table and left, and I didn’t see him again until the following spring, when we all met up for golf in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. By then he was back to his old self, and thoroughly optimistic about the next election two years hence—an election he’d go on to win decisively, and without my help.
“You’re leaving out something important,” Jeffrey said, “after he locked himself in his hotel suite.”
“What’s that?”
“He called my house.”
This didn’t make sense. “In California?”
“Of course.”
“But you were with us in Missouri.”
The look he gave me said, No shit.
“He told her he loved her, Will. Three in the morning, and he wakes her out of a dead sleep and says he loves her.”
“No.”
“He told her he’s always loved her.”
“Jesus—when did she tell you about it?”
“When I came home. I’m about to go to bed after a full day of travel, and Sara mentions it like it’s no big deal. Did you know that Nolan Albright called me late last night? As if I could possibly know. I almost threw up, hearing about it.”
“What did she say to him?”
“She told him to go to bed. I told her she should’ve told him to fuck off, but apparently she felt sorry for him because of how badly he’d gotten whipped in the election.” He looked out into the hallway, as if Nolan might’ve been standing there, listening this whole time. He lowered his voice. “You don’t do that, Will. You don’t phone your friend’s wife like that. Not after—”
“He was drunk. I’m not excusing it. But people say things when they’re drunk.”
“They tell the truth! That’s what people do when they’re drunk.”
“So what?” I said. “So he made a mistake. What do you care? You’re the one she married.”
His body seemed to be tensing up just thinking about it. His hands curled into fists. “Who did he think he was, huh? The Great Gatsby? Did he think he was some self-made big shot who could waltz in and steal my wife away?”
“Gatsby ended up dead in a swimming pool.”
“Yeah, that’s true. Served him right.”
“Come on, he was depressed. You were there. You saw it.”
“Still, that’s no excuse.”
“Isn’t it? Are you really going to sit here and claim you can’t understand how a depressed person might do something he’d later come to regret?”
We both looked over at Marie.
“Sara’s my wife,” Jeffrey said.
“Yes, that’s what makes it wrong. I see that.”
“It revealed a lot, is all I’m saying. I know you don’t like to think badly of anyone. That’s why I never told you any of this before. You like to have your little golf weekends and make insipid toasts and pretend we’re all still best friends. You pretend that history doesn’t exist. But it does. And the truth is that Nolan tried to betray me that night, just like he betrayed me before.”
Ah. So that’s what this was all about. Not some election-night impropriety. No, this went back further, to matters I’d assumed were long settled.
“You don’t know for sure that Nolan ever betrayed you,” I said. When he shook his head, dismissing the notion, I said, “Come on, Jeffrey, you were the English major. You know that life and literature aren’t the same thing.”
I was about to say that we’d been through all this before, when Nolan returned to the studio carrying a large cardboard box.
“That electronics store down the street has excellent bargains,” he said, set the box down in the control room, and tossed me my keys.
The box said Magnavox.
“You bought a TV?” I asked.
“Had to. So we can watch the news.”