“I don’t know,” I said.
“Women are better at this kind of thing, I think,” Walter said.
“I never thought about it.”
“I think women, Frank, sleep together all the time and don’t really bother with it. I believe Yolanda did. They understand friendship better in the long run.”
“Do you think you and this fellow, whatever his name is, are friends?”
“Probably not, Frank. No. But you and I are. I can say that I don’t have a better friend in the world than you are right now.”
“Well that’s good, Walter. Do you feel better?”
Walter thumped the space between his brown eyes with his middle finger and let go a deep breath. “No. No. No, I don’t. I didn’t even think I would, to tell you the truth. I don’t think I told you to feel better. Like I said, I didn’t want anything back. I just didn’t want it to be my secret. I don’t like secrets.”
“So, how do you feel?”
“About what?” Walter stared at me strangely.
“About sleeping with this man. What else have we been talking about?” I darted a look down the long bar. One of the fishermen was sitting staring at us, apart from the others who were watching a TV above the cash register, watching the Yankees game. The fisherman looked drunk, and I suspected he wasn’t really listening to what we were saying, though that was no sign he couldn’t hear it by accident. “Or about telling me. I don’t know,” I said almost in a whisper. “Either one.”
“Have you ever been poor, Frank?” Walter glanced at the fisherman, then back at me.
“No. Not really.”
“Me, too. Or me either. I haven’t been. But that’s exactly how I feel now. Like I’m impoverished, just suddenly. Not that I want anything. Not that I even can lose anything. I just feel bad, though I’m probably not going to kill myself.”
“Do you think that’s what being poor’s like? Feeling bad?”
“Maybe,” Walter said. “It’s my version anyway. Maybe you’ve got a better one.”
“No. Not really. That’s fine.”
“Maybe we all need to be poor, Frank. Just once. Just to earn the right to live.”
“Maybe so, Walter. I hope not. I wouldn’t like it much.”
“But don’t you feel sometimes, Frank, like you’re living way up on the top of life, and not really living all of it, all the way down deep?”
“No. I never felt that way, Walter. I just always felt like I was living all the life I could.”
“Well, then you’re lucky,” Walter Luckett said bluntly. He tapped his glass on the bar. Evangelis looked around, but Walter waved him off. He let a couple of ice cubes wiggle around in his mouth a moment. “You’ve got a date, don’t you pal?” He tried to smile around the ice cubes and looked stupid.
“I did, anyway.”
“Oh, you’ll be fine,” Walter said. He laid a crisp five-dollar bill out on the bar. He probably had plenty of such bills in his pocket. He adjusted his sweater around his shoulders. “Let’s take a walk, Frank.”
We walked out of the bar, past the fishermen and Evangelis, standing under the TV looking up at the color screen and the game. The fishermen who’d been staring at us still sat staring at the space where we’d been. “Come back, fellas,” Evangelis said, smiling, though we were already out the door.
Awash down the boat channel and the dark Manasquan River, the night air was fresher than I could’ve imagined it, a cool, after-rain airishness, an evening to soothe away human troubles. Over the water, halyards were belling on the metal masts in the dark, a lonely elegiac sound. Lighted condos rose above the far river bank.
“Tell me something, would you.” Walter took a deep breath and let it out. Two young black men holding their own gear and plastic bait-buckets were loitering on the gangplank of the Mantoloking Belle, ready for an all-night adventure. Ben Mouzakis stood in his pilot’s house staring down at them from the dark.
“If I can.” I said.
Walter seemed to be feeling better in spite of himself. “Why’d you quit writing?”
“Oh that’s a long story, Walter.” I crammed my hands in my pockets and weasled away a step or two toward my car.
“I guess so, I guess so. Sure. They’re all long stories, aren’t they?”
“I’ll tell you sometime, since we’re friends, Walter. But not right now.”
“Frank, I’d like that. I really would. Sit down over a drink and hear it all out. We’ve all got our stories, don’t we?”
“Mine’s a pretty simple one.”
“Well, good. I like ’em simple.”
“Take care, Walter. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“You take care, Frank.”
Walter started toward his car at the far end of the gravel lot, though when he was twenty yards from me he started running for some reason, and ran until I couldn’t see him anymore, only his white shorts and his thin legs fading in the night.
Central Jersey dozed in a sweet spring somnolence. DJ’s as far south as Tom’s River crooned along the seaboard that it was after eight. Nighttime streets were clearing from Bangor to Cape Canaveral, and I was out of luck with Vicki, though I tried to make good time.
At Freehold I stopped for the hell of it and called her apartment where no one answered; she unplugged the phone after bedtime. I called the nurses’ private hospital number — a number I’m not supposed to know, reserved for loved ones in case of emergency; the regular hospital number with the last digit changed to zero. A woman answered in a startled voice and said her records showed Miss Arcenault wasn’t scheduled. Was it an emergency? No. Thanks, I said.
For some reason I called my house. The answering machine clicked on with my voice, cheerier than I could bear to hear myself. I beeped for a message and there was X’s managerial-professional voice saying she would meet me the next morning. I hung up before, she was finished.
Once, when our basset hound, Mr. Toby, was killed by a car that didn’t bother to stop — right on Hoving Road — X, in tears, said she wished that time could just be snatched back. Precious seconds and deeds retrieved for a better try at things. And I thought, while I dug the grave behind the forsythias along the cemetery fence, that it was like a woman to grieve over a simple fact in that hopeless-extravagant way. Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things. Only that’s exactly what I craved now! A precious hour returned to me; a part of Walter’s sad disclosures held over till a later date — hardly the best of things.
What’s friendship’s realest measure?
I’ll tell you. The amount of precious time you’ll squander on someone else’s calamities and fuck-ups.
And as a consequence, zipping along the Jersey darkside past practical Hightstown, feeling ornery as a bunkhouse cook, the baddies suddenly swarmed my car like a charnel mist so dense that not even opening the window would rout them.
Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has, disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that. And New Jersey, muted and adaptable, is the perfect landscape for that very loneliness, its other pleasures notwithstanding. Michigan comes close, with its long, sad vistas, its desolate sunsets over squatty frame houses, second-growth forests, flat interstates and dog-eared towns like Dowagiac and Munising. But only close. New Jersey’s is the purest loneliness of all.