The bar, too, had seen better days. But it was cool and dark, its wood-paneled walls covered with aged photos of smiling celebrities, its chairs filled with florid-faced old men. “Jameson with a soda back,” Tuck told the bartender, a young man with slick, dark hair and the sort of mustache that had gone out of style thirty years prior. “Same,” said Tal.
“Will you, um—” Sadie asked. “Can you—” Tal nodded.
“Okay,” she said nervously. “Could you order me a cup of decaf, if they have it? I’m going to run to the bathroom.”
When she emerged—mildly less uncomfortable—Tuck and Tal had taken their drinks to a small Formica table lit by the red glare of a Budweiser sign and adorned with a set of Heineken coasters. Tuck held a short, unfiltered cigarette between his fingers. “Isn’t that illegal?” Sadie asked, nodding at it.
Tuck shrugged and lit a match. “I thought outside of the city you could smoke.”
“No. Statewide ban.”
“That guy’s smoking.” At a table in the corner, an ancient man sat hunched over a hand-rolled cigarette and a beer.
“Oh.” Sadie looked balefully at her white mug of coffee, which smelled burned, then turned her attention to the faux-wood bowl of miniature pretzels, but could not bring herself to eat even one. They should not be here. They should have waited, patiently, in the punishing traffic, or figured out a new route along the city streets. Now she knew, in a flash, they would never make it to the funeral. Tuck would order scotch after scotch, growing more and more belligerent, until they had to carry him home.
“The truth,” he said now to Tal. “Don’t you feel weird saying that?”
Tal looked at Sadie for the first time, she realized, since his arrival, and stretched his long hand out toward her on the table. Did he mean for her to take it?
“Tal,” she said. “The bartender might be able to give us directions to the cemetery that bypass the LIE.”
“I just don’t get that you could think that the world offers one truth,” Tuck said. “You went to Oberlin.”
Tal turned from Sadie, taking a quick gulp of his drink. “So?” he said finally.
Tuck stared at him. “Well, it’s just so archaic. It’s, like, premodern. Our generation, we’re postmodern. There is no one truth. The truth isn’t a fixed thing. It’s subjective.”
Suddenly, Tal began to laugh. Tuck let out a little chuckle, too, either out of sympathy or confusion. “I loved Kierkegaard in college, too. But it doesn’t really hold up, you know. Life just isn’t like that. Things are much more black-and-white. She loves you or she doesn’t. You have a job or you don’t. Your parents are alive or dead.” Sadie started at this. Had his parents died without any of them knowing it? Surely he would have told Dave, at least. “The truth is the truth. Incontrovertible facts. How it makes you feel, that’s subjective.” He paused, gauging the length of Tuck’s fuse. “You’re a journalist, right? Isn’t it your job to present the truth?”
Tuck snorted, downed his drink, and waved his hand at the bartender, signaling for another round. “Please. You don’t really believe that Woodward and Bernstein bullshit.” The drink arrived and Tuck looked at it suspiciously, as though it had come unbidden. “You can drink?” he asked Tal.
“I’m not Mormon.” Tal laughed.
But Tuck did not smile. He wrapped his hand around the tumbler of scotch and raised it eagerly to his mouth, flicking his eyes from Sadie to Tal.
“So you had a thing for Lil, right?” he asked suddenly, his tone becoming brisk and efficient.
“No,” said Tal, before Tuck had even got the words out. Still, he was too late. Tuck’s face was already twisting into a closemouthed smirk.
“Not even in college?” He raised an eyebrow. “All those late nights at the radio station?”
“No,” said Tal, smiling and tilting his chair onto its back legs.
“I knew it.” Tuck laughed, clapping his hands. “I’m a very good judge of character. She used to say you were in love with Dave. And you fell in love with Sadie because she was a version of him that you could actually have.”
Sadie sighed. She’d heard this from Lil, too, a zillion times, and now, hearing it from Tuck, she felt deeply bored. She supposed Tuck wanted to shock them.
“But I always thought it was because she was a version of Lil you could actually have.”
Was this true? Sadie wondered. No, certainly not. In college, they’d been close, Lil and Tal, and at one point the rest of them had speculated, but they’d speculated about everyone. Though there was that night—which year? junior or senior?—when she, Sadie, had asked him about Lil—why? Had she wanted him, way back then? Had she wanted proof that he didn’t want Lil more than her? Was she such a monster of vanity, unable to imagine a world in which men and women didn’t trample one another vying for her friendship? No, no, of course not, on all accounts. They’d just been talking—they were friends—and he’d told her, without hesitation, something that had made no sense to her at the time. “If Lil became my girlfriend,” he’d said, “she wouldn’t be Lil anymore.”
“What do you mean?” Sadie had asked him querulously. “How could she not be herself? She is herself.”
“No,” Tal insisted. “She’d be diminished.”
Now, a decade later, she finally understood what he meant: marriage had, certainly, diminished Lil—made her petty and sad and afraid and certainly less than the sum of her parts. And this was because of Tuck, yes, but it was also Lil—she had, somehow, allowed it.
“Sadie,” Tal said to her now, but she would not look at him, no, she would not.
“I’m going to talk to the bartender,” she said. Five minutes later she had directions, in blue ink, on a plush cocktail napkin. “Let’s go,” she said, hoisting her bag on her shoulder.
They left the small parking lot, with its cluster of dinged, dated cars, and continued through the low, gray town and onto the sort of artery that gave Sadie a chilclass="underline" mile after mile of auto dealerships and strip malls and gas stations and Bennigan’s and Applebee’s, streams of people inexplicably filing into their depths.
“We’re in hell,” Tuck droned, his large forehead pressed to the window, and Sadie, for once, was inclined to agree with him. “This is what Atlanta looks like now. Hell. The fucking Roths would make us come out here.”
There was traffic on this road, too—presumably other travelers trying to bypass the expressway—and they missed every light. Tuck slowly began to beat his head against the window.
“I bet everyone else is stuck, too,” said Sadie. Tuck shrugged, his face still turned to the window, in the posture of a sullen twelve-year-old. But as the road narrowed and the shopping centers grew farther and farther apart—they were getting closer, Sadie was sure—he sat up straight and folded his hands tensely in his lap.
“I know you all think this is my fault,” he said. “Everything that happened.”
“No,” said Sadie. “We don’t.”
“No,” said Tal. “None of us think that.”
“See,” Tuck nearly shouted. “That’s what I just couldn’t stand. The ‘we.’” He mimicked Sadie: “‘Oh no, we don’t blame you.’ I got so sick of hearing about your little group. Your perfect, interesting little lives. Your interesting jobs. Your stupid perfect families.”