“Dedman, of course. It took him a week. We were neighbors again. No sense about money, no feel for the score. ‘Dedman,’ I asked, ‘just what do you do?’ He was a clerk, he drove taxis, he worked at a bench, a gardener, an usher, a pumper of gas. Caddy, orderly, schlepper of mail. What didn’t Dedman? Dedman of the semiskill and the student duty. For understand, these were all summer jobs, Christmas rush, the small-time tasks of piecemeal pressure, timed to semesters, holidays, school dismissed because of the snowstorm. As though simply by going through a process of part-time employment, he could maintain the fiction that he was making it the hard way like orphans before him. He lived in a myth. And without the squirrel’s sense of winter but only his busyness had this strange garret notion of himself, laying in his profitless, pointless struggles like grist for those plaque landmarks that honor puny origins. ‘On this day, in this place, on this spot, nothing happened, Dedman,’ I told him.
“But all he gave me was the old business — hot pursuit and the language of romance. ‘Two can live cheaply as one,’ he said, and slipped me ardor and the arguments of old time’s sake.
“‘Dedman, Dedman, tell no tales,’ I told him. There had been no old times, you understand, only Dedman’s hard-sold dream out of books of a Damon Dedman and a Pythias Feldman, a Romulus Leonard and Remus Leo. (And what he made of our names! ‘Leonard, the Leo-hearted,’ I called him once.)
“I tried to discourage him — that’s the truth. The man insisted on our intimacy, giving me — met in the street, on corners, in stores, or even on the stairs or at the mailbox in the hall, gratuitous for us then as the garage in the back — the secret handshake of the heart. He was obsessed by our birthwrong. (And something just occurred to me: how did he know about mine? How did he know? I don’t remember telling him, but I might have. Put that down to my credit. Fair’s fair. Or if I never told him, then put down to my credit that it was written all over my face.) And leaned heavily on the Dedman-deemed mutuality of our lives like some old out-of-work frat man — he’d been, as I say, a student — making a nuisance of himself in his fraternity brother’s office. But of course even his premise was wrong. I’d had my father for sixteen years, and my homunculus, if I’d known it, forever.
“It’s a wonder I didn’t call a cop. ‘Get yourself a girl,’ I said. ‘Buy a paper tonight. Go through the want ads carefully. Look out for something with a future. Flourish. Thrive. Purge those gypsy grudges, Dedman. Lord,’ I called over my shoulder, ‘deliver this delivery boy.’
“So saying, I took hold myself. What’s good for the goose is unexceptionable for the gander, is it not? And to practice what one preaches makes perfect, doesn’t it? I seized the bullish world. What can I tell you? The war and all, opportunity, the seller’s market and all — I grew rich. By 1940 I had already chosen the warehouse that would become my department store, by ’41 I was already in it, and by ’42 and ’43 I was established, getting while the getting was good and the casualties mounted.
“I didn’t see a lot of Dedman in those years. I still maintained the same apartment but was away so much, putting together my store, that I didn’t see him. (Though he was there. Like myself he was four-F, and what he made of that I don’t have to tell you. ‘Our disease,’ he called it.) Then, suddenly, the year the war ended, I decided to capitulate. After a siege of ten years or so, I called him in and told him we would be friends. He smiled me a smile and shook my hand, and we made the manly acknowledgments, the toasts and the jokes, and I discovered before he went back to his apartment that night that it was too late — that we were already friends, that we had been friends all along and that our friendship ended on the evening I gave in to him. That until then I’d been fonder of him than he was of me, because, after all, he’d seen in me only an analogue of himself, only some far-fetched Dedmanic Doppelgänger, while I had seen in him qualities, states of being and the hardware of character. Before that evening was over I’d had it with him, with Feldman’s friend Dedman, his enemy Dedman.
“Though I didn’t let on. I knew I’d get him. (Let me make something clear. I don’t say I needed reasons. Maybe, at first. And maybe I had some. But what happened would have happened without reasons. So let me make something clear. What I did was not because I was acting on faulty reasons. It wasn’t poor judgment or a lousy argument.)
“It was very rough, being his friend. A little Dedman went great distances — light-years. Christ, I was bored.
“‘What do we do, Dedman, now that we’re friends?’ And don’t let him kid you — it was as new to him as it was to me. Neither of us had the hang of it. I know I was sorry we weren’t still kids. Kids have it soft. They wrestle, they run, shout, sing, throw the ball. So we just sat around, seemly now, shy. And suddenly making telephone calls.
“‘What’re you doing?’
“‘Lying around.’
“‘You want to come down?’
“‘I got my TV. Come up if you want.’
“‘Your television came?’
“‘I brought one home from the store.’
“‘How does it work?’
“‘Okay. Pretty good.’
“‘What’re you watching?’
“‘Wrestling.’
“‘Wrestling is fixed.’
“‘It’s all they have on.’”
“My God, the arrangements, the crabbed propositions of regard! Consideration’s deflections like blindness to a wart on a pal’s nose. Friendship is fixed. Friendship is. The dives of deference and the shaved points of solicitude.
“‘Leo, it’s Leonard.’
“‘Yeah, Leonard. Hi.’
“‘Do you want to go out?’
“‘What’s there to do?’
“‘There’s this movie downtown.’
“‘A movie? You think?’
“‘We could go tie one on.’
“‘Well, tomorrow there’s work.’
“‘You’re right. I forgot.’
“‘We’d get back too late.’
“‘There’s a lecture at school.’
“‘Is that so? What’s it on?’
“‘The Second World War.’
“‘Sounds over my head.’
“’Wanna come down and read?’
“‘Well, maybe. Okay.’
“‘Not too exciting.’
“‘Well, I’m tired tonight.’
“‘What time you be down?’
“‘Gee, I’ve still got to eat.’
“‘What time? Say a time.’
“‘Around eight? Around nine?’
“‘All right. See you then.’
“One night Dedman took me to a restaurant. I’d told him it was my birthday, though it wasn’t. I’d said it to give us something to do — just as when he got a new job or I had done well at the store, I would take him out, declare a celebration, so that at this time our relationship was one of shared occasions, Fictive red-letter days, spurious as the commemorative excuse for a sale of used cars. Oh, those celebrations, those pious festivals!
“And this was the night that I told him it wasn’t working out — though I hadn’t planned to, didn’t know that I’d do it till I’d done it, so that, let me make something clear, what happened, what I did, was never what you could call a conspiracy, just as it wasn’t predicated on feeble arguments — that the friendship had failed. ‘Phooey on our kid-glove comity, our loveless diplomatic chumhood. My apartment’s no embassy, Leonard. Tact’s crap, it’s defunct. Well, I take your line,’ I said. ‘No one’s to blame. What, orphans like us? You kidding? Shy, sure we’re shy. Us virgins in croniness, us unpanned-out pals. Oh, the roughnecks, Leonard’ I said, ‘they have the fun. They’re the ones.’ (Let me make something clear. I’ve said I’d known I would get him. I’ve told you that. So that what was beginning to happen that night, unreasoned, not worked out, was maybe just a sort of destiny, Leonard’s lot, say, or Dedman’s portion, perhaps.) ‘Let’s really cut loose. Other guys do. Will you try? Are you game? Will you take my advice?’