Page 14

Alex is a real dick for noticing these things, and worse for feeling sort of smug about his own good looks in comparison. But it’s the one thing, the only thing he has over Connor, so he lets himself have his private pettiness.

Connor can’t stop regaling Alex with way more details than anyone needs about his recent sexual encounters with these two women. And he delivers it all in a loud, booming baritone, even though it’s just the two of them in the small cabin. Connor always talks as if he’s trying to attract an audience.

Alex doesn’t waste his breath warning Connor that he’s playing with fire, because Connor knows he’s gonna get burned—he always does—and he loves it.

“Oh shit, did you hear Dex died?” Connor says. The pivot from getting a blow job in the bathroom at Nobu to the death of one of their classmates is dizzying. The whisky Alex is guzzling isn’t helping.

“Wait, what? Dexter died?”

“Yeah, yeah, so I guess you didn’t hear. Last month. His mom posted a tribute on Facebook with some hokey poem. Dexter would’ve hated that. But yeah… Dead. Just like that.”

“Seriously? What was it… a heart attack?”

Dexter would probably have been voted most likely out of their high school class to have a heart attack even at seventeen. Alex remembers him as a portly kid who always had a sheen of sweat on his forehead and a pack of beef jerky in his pocket.

“Brain aneurysm, actually. At least he went fast. I just hope he was having sex with his wife… Claire? Corrine?… when it hit. I mean, we’re not even in our forties. We should have at least ten more years before we gotta start thinking about dying, man. That’s why we gotta live! To the fullest! And really embrace this time together!” Connor is dangerously close to howling at the moon. He gestures wildly with his crystal tumbler at their surroundings, the choppy water through the gold-clad portholes reflecting the very last stubborn rays of sun. “It all goes so fucking fast. Maybe I need to settle down. Find a nice Corrine… or a Claire, myself.”

This is how Alex knows Connor is officially drunk. Drunk Connor always makes morose proclamations about how it’s time for him to find the right woman and get off the market, proclamations that are quickly forgotten the next day when he’s sober and eager to revisit the buffet.

“Oh, speaking of updates… Schuster’s in rehab… again,” Connor says, taking a big swig from his glass with zero awareness of the irony.

“No way. Shit. What, is this the third time?” Alex crosses his arms against his body as if this can somehow hide his uneasiness.

“Fourth. I’ve spent about $70K trying to help the guy get clean. Like, when do you give up, you know?”

Why Connor continues to pay for Schuster to go to rehab has always been a mystery to Alex. Their entire friendship was a mystery. Connor never liked the guy from the second Schuster arrived at Tate as a transfer student surrounded by rumors about how and why he got kicked out of his last prep school. Alex’s money was on the one about him secretly installing a video camera in the girls’ locker room. He never could see why Connor liked the dude and brought him into their fold. Their shared love of manga porn and Quentin Tarantino movies didn’t seem like enough, but twenty years later they’d stayed close.

Meanwhile, Alex did give up on Schuster a long time ago, specifically on the day he married Simone. It was supposed to be a small wedding, thrown together hastily at Donette’s insistence a few months after he and newly pregnant Simone moved back from Spain. His future mother-in-law had strong feelings about out-of-wedlock babies. As in “no daughter of mine.” At first, Simone and Alex tried to get away with sealing the deal at city hall. Her in a white suit, him in blue jeans and the family blazer that his wife thought was hilarious. But both Poppy and Donette quickly shot that idea down, an odd matchup for a united front.

They finally agreed to do something at the University Club downtown where Poppy had been a member forever. The guest list quickly ballooned once his grandfather insisted on inviting all his business associates—he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to show off and network. Alex had planned on only inviting Connor, whom he had asked to be his best man, but then when it became a three-hundred-plus-person affair, he decided to go ahead and invite their whole group of guys from school, the “Tate Twelve,” they’d called themselves, which meant including Schuster. Predictably, Schuster got wasted beyond belief within the first hour of the reception. Then, to make matters worse, as Simone and Alex danced to their first song, he sidled over to them and loudly slurred in Alex’s ear. “I’ve never dipped in the chocolate myself, but if I did, she’d have to be hot like Simone. True what they say, once you go Black, you can never go back?” He stopped to cackle at his hilarity, totally unbothered that he had just ruined their first dance as a married couple, as Alex stared at him in disbelief.

“What, it was a joke! And you are hot, Simone, so it was a compliment,” Schuster slurred. “Man, everyone is so uptight. This is a wedding!”

Connor immediately swooped in, the way Connor always did, and led Schuster away and out of the room. Alex didn’t see him again after that. By then their song, Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love,” had finished and given way to Lionel Richie. Simone was frozen on the dance floor, and Alex knew he had to fix it, but he didn’t know what to say. He looked desperately at Simone. “I’m so, so sorry, babe.”

“What are you apologizing for? You’re not the jackass.”

“I shouldn’t have invited the jackass in the first place.”

“You’re right. We’re never seeing that man again, clear?”

“Clear.”

“And he’s most certainly not going to ruin our night.” Simone grabbed his ass and pulled him close over her swollen belly draped in some slinky fabric, their son kicking between them like he wanted to be on the dance floor. It was the easiest promise he’d ever made.

“Sorry to hear that, man,” Alex replies to Connor now, somewhat disingenuously. “Hopefully it’ll take this time.”

“Eh, we’ll see. You can lead a horse to water and all that. You wouldn’t even believe how fucking much these places cost. They should offer a money-back guarantee. But whatever, I feel like I have to do it. He’s got no real family, and I know the two of you have had your bullshit, but he’s a good friend when he’s not wasted, he really is. Loyal as hell. He’d do anything for me. And sometimes I feel kind of like it’s my fault. I was always the one sneaking us booze back in the dorms.”

“We all drank a ton back at Tate,” Alex says.

“It was more than that. We got into some hard stuff too. Not you, you little scaredy-cat. But you know, the rest of us… we did a little blow here and there. And then this one time the dealer didn’t have any of the good stuff, so he slipped us some rock and we smoked that.”

“Hold up! You smoked crack in high school?”

Connor nods sheepishly. “Just one time our senior year, and I got so fucking sick off it, but the high. Man, I’ve never forgotten it.”

And now Connor’s blowing through cash on rehab stint after rehab stint like he’s trying to make some fucked-up amends? If Alex was more sober, he’d point out the futility of this, but his pep talk is reduced to a cliché he heard at the one Al-Anon meeting he’d gone to. “That’s not on you, Con. People are responsible for their own shit.”