“So where does my mother come in?”
“Back to the Turkish restaurant and my friend Abigail Zabriskie,” Eddie said. “I was not in good shape after that dinner. Once Skip and Polly got married and moved away, there was a period of great awkwardness between us. Clearly we needed to wrap things up, and we all felt the burden of that, even Polly, who had no idea what was going on. Skip’s answer was to be a total bear to me whenever we were together. After that horrible dinner, your mother and I decided to take a walk through the Commons. I wasn’t talking and she wasn’t talking and then finally she said, ‘So how is he your friend?’ and just like that, the whole story came out. I had never told anyone the truth about Skip, not before or since, except of course for tonight. Well, I told your mother the truth about all of it.”
“And that’s when you started dating?” Jesus, Mom, what were you thinking?
“Sweet word, ‘dating,’ but yes, that’s when things started. For the record, I adored your mother. She was wonderful to me. And I loved you and your sister. She was offering me an off-ramp from the half-life I’d been living. I could have a wife and children and the little house—”
“—and all you had to do was give up Skip.”
“Which, on that night, did not seem like such a hardship. No one would say such a thing today, but there was a time when it did not feel like lunacy to want what the majority of the human population had. Your mother’s deal was that I had to give up Skipand give up being gay. I know it sounds terrible now, but she didn’t know any better. I’m the one who should have known better.”
“Now I have to feel bad for Pollyandmy mother.”
“They were never in the same category. Your mother was a true friend betrayed.”
A photographer appeared at our little table then. Later it would occur to me that I should have sent her away, considering that I didn’t remember the bride and hadn’t been invited to the wedding, but in the moment I tipped my head to Eddie’s chest and he wrapped his arm around my shoulder.
Somewhere around midnight a new singer appeared, a girl who looked to be every minute of fourteen, and suddenly the ceiling was lit with violet light. That she was extremely famous was clear to everyone, even those of us who had no idea who she was. She was the last great surprise of the night, and when she took the stage, the wedding guests lost their minds, keening and whistling and stamping their feet. We decided, through a series of hand gestures, that the time had come for our departure. We declined the gift bags being handed out at the door. We didn’t want to take advantage of the situation.
Once we were outside the Plaza, we briefly discussed taking off our shoes and climbing into the fountain like Scott and Zelda, and then thought better of it. This was what it meant to grow old: we were capable of thinking better of it before it happened.
“Do you remember—” I began.
“I remember everything.” Eddie’s arm was back around my shoulder.
A few small clouds sailed miles above us, passing the moon. “Do you remember the story you told me that night in the car?”
“Which one?”
“The one about the woman and her horse.”
“Oh, that one,” he said. “Of course I do.”
“Whistler,” I said, and suddenly I was afraid I’d cry again. Being drunk was a terrible burden.
“Whistler,” he said, looking up at the moon between the buildings. “That’s right.”
“I thought about that woman and her horse for a long time after you left, and I wondered if maybe you’d told me the story because you were leaving and you wanted me to know you’d come back for me, which, of course, you did.”
“Only it took me considerably longer than you thought it might.”
I smiled. Oh, this night, this arm around my shoulder. “Did you make that story up for a reason?”
Eddie stopped and lit another cigarette, and this time I almost asked if I could join him even though I don’t smoke. “I didn’t make that story up. It was a book proposal, straight off my desk.”
“Someone else made it up?”
“No, no, nonfiction. I was more open to nonfiction back then, and it was the most spectacular story. The woman’s name was Mary Carter. She lived on a ranch in Wyoming about fifty miles south of Sheridan.”
I would have sworn the story wasn’t true, even though Eddie told me at the time that it was. Nothing about it seemed true. “How do you remember this?”
“Because I tried to buy the book. I tried for years. An agent had seen a piece about the accident in the newspaper, it was practically nothing, maybe three inches of column, and she got in touch with Mary. She told Mary there was a book in there. The agent sent me the clipping and a brief outline. For all I knew, theagent had written the proposal herself because Mary Carter never seemed to have any interest in writing a book. She and I talked several times. She was a shy person, very polite. I would have flown out to Wyoming to meet her, but then my foot was in a cast and I was living on the Hotallings’ couch. I thought it could be a great book, especially the business with the horse. I called her again once I settled at S&S. I even called her when I got the job at Random House. Random House! Boy, she’s going to listen to me now. But Mary Carter didn’t know Random House from a mimeograph machine. She’d listen to me tell her own story back to her, explain why it was meaningful, why people would want to read it, but I could never get her on board. The farther away she got from the accident, the less she had to say. I think it was hard for her to tell me to leave her alone.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“She died,” Eddie said. “Years and years ago. She was older than I was, maybe fifteen years or so. Her daughter wrote to tell me. She said when she was going through her mother’s things, she found my letters. She said she knew her mother cared for me, she could tell that by reading my side of the correspondence.”
“How did she die?”
