He’d never given me any indication that he gave the matter of love any thought at all, let alone “forever,” and I could only assume that he had surprised himself, as well.
“It’s too bad she’s with Jeffrey,” I said.
“Yeah. Too bad.”
“But she is with Jeffrey. So …”
In January, the Gothic buildings, leafless maples, and brown athletic fields looked dreary and ominous. I sloshed through a puddle.
“It kills me, you know,” he said, “seeing them together.”
“I understand,” I said, “but that’s how it is.”
“God, Will, what does she see in him?”
“Oh, don’t start blaming Jeffrey. That isn’t cool.”
“Maybe. It’s just that I’ve never felt this way about anyone.”
“You never kept any of them around long enough.” His record, I believed, was a month. “You’ve known Sara now for two years. Which of your girlfriends have you known that long?”
It was a question I could’ve asked myself. I’d dated a few women, and none of them had aroused feelings in me that remotely suggested forever.
“Good point,” he said.
We passed a cluster of dormitories built during World War II, squat ugly structures with names like “1942 Hall” that resembled army barracks and were consistently bypassed, I’d noticed, on campus tours in favor of the older, ornate buildings for which the university was known.
“Look,” I said, “if they were to break up sometime down the road … maybe that’d be a different story. But otherwise, you can’t make a move. You just can’t. It’s that simple.”
“It is?”
“Of course. So you’ll just have to put her out of your mind. Anyway, it’s not like you have any trouble, how do I say this …”
“If you’re going to tell me that there are plenty of fish in the sea, I’m going to beat you senseless.”
But then he thanked me for listening to him, and soon we reached our dormitory, where we lived in adjacent singles. After I went into my room and he into his, we never spoke of the matter again. Within the week, Nolan had begun a brand-new liaison, and I could clearly hear the honesty and respect coming from the other side of our shared wall.
So it surprised me to learn about Nolan’s election-night confession all those years later. However ill-advised, it did reveal a level of longing and romantic depth that I hadn’t known he was capable of feeling.
But also, if Nolan really had confessed his love to Sara while in some drunken, postelection despair, why would the incident, now six years in the past, continue to bother Jeffrey? Except, I knew why. Jeffrey had linked that transgression to another, earlier one. And the combined effect was evidently to tarnish Nolan irrevocably in Jeffrey’s eyes.
Before today, I hadn’t the faintest clue that one of my closest friends was deemed a serpent in the eyes of my other friend. And wasn’t that the strangest thing of all? Jeffrey had been able to conceal those feelings from the rest of us all these years. The Jeffrey I’d met twelve years ago would’ve been incapable of that sort of deception. It was why I’d liked him immediately—his transparent, somewhat bewildered expression was a refreshing change from the guarded gleam I saw in the eyes of so many future lawyers and CEOs and bankers on campus.
Jeffrey’s parents must have protected him well, because except for the cigarettes, he’d seemed a young eighteen when I first met him. He seemed a bit immature, or—to take his age out of the equation—prone to emotional swings, and I used to imagine that somewhere in the world there was an artist searching fruitlessly for his temperament.
As I was thinking about Jeffrey, he let out a heavy sigh in his sleep and rolled over onto his side.
I wondered what, exactly, had changed him. What about his personality had led to today’s blatant unhinging? Was it personality at all, or was it circumstance, or some amalgam of the two? And if so, were any of us immune?
Once this evening’s agreement had been reached, and the twelve hours lay long before us, we had little to say to one another. We were talked out, and so we watched TV. At eleven o’clock we watched the local news, anxiously waiting, but then the hard news was over and we were looking at sports highlights, then a map of the United States—plenty of sun over much of the country—and then eleven thirty arrived and with it the brassy riffs signaling the beginning of late-night television.