But it was news to me, this condition of his. I’d always thought . . .
“What d’you mean, a ploy? A ploy—?! Do you think I’m spending my days trying to think up how to win your sympathy? That’s a hot one.”
To make amends, I bought him a drink. To show he accepted my amends, Aaron ordered the priciest single malt at the well, took one sip and let it stand . . .
What he might have been—in a different world maybe, or with different talents—was a writer. He talked about the impossibility of it often enough. Once (again, New York) while he was out running an errand or trying to score drugs, I was satisfying idle curiosity in the drawers of his desk and ran across some of his work. I don’t pretend my tastes are all that developed, but what I read truly embarrassed me. Lots of references to “torment” and “the abyss.” It was pretty clear, in any case, the nature of Aaron’s impossibility. I think this chance discovery—one not shared, of course—marked a turning point in our relationship, in an obvious way, and it clearly wasn’t for the best. Now, whenever I heard Aaron go off on the subject of betrayal, I all but resonated with sympathy and understanding. No, it was no good at all.
New York—I never expected to end up here. It helped knowing Aaron had preceded me by a year. By the time I arrived, he’d been fired from his fact-checking job (he refused to share the details) and was working at the Strand, shelving books, where he stayed until he was legally blind.
My early years in the city are a blur now. I worked for men who were born assholes, career bullies, and, after work, I partied until I was insensate. Mostly clubbing, with Aaron, whose way I mostly paid. I learned to cope without sleep. There I had help, admittedly. It was like I was breaking, but breaking forward, into a new kind of conflict with myself. Others felt it too, I felt. I was more at ease with women, and I dressed up my act with what success told me was newfound grace. But success of a peculiar sort. I’d managed to push what I really wanted further out of reach. It was defeat masquerading as attack.
Aaron and I had perfected a rhythm together, which we played out—I want to say to the end, but that wouldn’t be true. Things never fall together that neatly. Or maybe it depresses me to think about how it did end, in a way. “‘Let go.’ Don’t you mean shit-canned? Just what kind of lawyer did you think you were anyways?”
Not a good one—clearly. I had no passion to draw upon except for fear of failure and when I’d anesthetized that fear, there wasn’t much in the way of competence to save me. But I don’t beat myself up about it. Mistakes were made. And I don’t blame Aaron either, although maybe I did a little at the time. My first few years out of the firm, making ends meet through a succession of grisly legal temp services and nonprofits, were a financial nightmare, but one which woke me from a period of intense and possibly permanent self-delusion, and for that I suppose I should be grateful, or so the therapist I’d started seeing then helped me to understand. It was also around this time that I met the woman who I willingly and without second thoughts would have married.
There were facets of Aaron nobody could deal with for long and not get irritated. The more settled I became, in my new job and with C—, the farther apart we drifted. I don’t recall a scene or formal break, simply a growing perception on both our parts that the friendship was no longer tenable. He began to annoy me. Why had I allowed this guy to hold any influence over my life? I masked these feelings as best I could, but Aaron wasn’t stupid, he could see I’d changed, and no doubt he too felt disappointment. Our communications grew shorter, duller, infrequent, then more or less discontinued.
Personally I would have preferred something definitive. In his absence, I tried to work myself up into fits of pique, remembering favors owed, money borrowed and never paid back, instances of extraordinary munificence on my part and great callousness on his, and I would prepare myself the way I used to prepare for trial, thinking up things he might say, then me coming back with a retort or sometimes a speech, and I’d go rigid with indignation. I’d even do this on the street.
I hadn’t seen him in about a year when one day he stopped by the office for “a bit of free legal counsel,” although he probably was hoping I’d offer more. I gave him a lot of unnecessary advice, tossed around some legalisms, tried to make the situation look as complicated as possible, all of it to prove that I was in my element. In short, I made an ass of myself. Aaron was having a hard time putting his sentences together, and threads of saliva would gather at the corner of his mouth. He used a lot of big words—correctly I’m assuming, but who the hell cared?—as if he, too, had something to prove. “See?” he seemed to be saying. “I may be a total fuck-up and I may be on my way to jail or out on the street, but I still have a healthy vocabulary.”
Quite possibly, I asked him what drugs he was on, I mean it was that obvious. Quite possibly, I offered to give him a couple of numbers to call. Rehab, that sort of thing. Maybe he took serious offense and maybe, under similar circumstances, I would have, too. But the phrase hides a lot of things—second chances, third chances, half a lifetime of lifelines seen and not taken, and plenty of good old-fashioned fucking up.
Inexplicably, even though many more years would pass without our communicating, when C— left me, it was Aaron I thought to call first. I rang up directory assistance and after several false leads, located him in Astoria, at the top of the N line.
It was one of the first nice days of spring. The few trees planted on the sidewalk were tipped with green and the air itself seemed to be coming into leaf. The exhaust-blackened balance of the last big snowfall edged the curbs. I held Aaron’s address, which I’d jotted down the night before on the back of another distressing bank statement. Our conversation hadn’t gone too well, especially in the beginning. Aaron was phlegmatic. I got the sense that everything he said was some private sarcasm—that tone of voice.
“No,” he replied to a suggested meeting place. “I don’t get out much these days.”
I was ready to give up. Why force a reconciliation? Clearly, he wanted nothing to do with me. Stupidly, though, I got onto the subject of C—, a dismal topic, and then came details I hadn’t wanted to share, things that made me look like a fool or worse. Such as her last words to me right after she asked for the keys: “I was wondering . . . listen, would you mind very much walking the dog? I need to shower and I can’t be late for work.”
Aaron laughed so hard I had to hold the receiver away from my ear.
“Walk the dog!” he cried. “Are you the universal straight man or what?! Ha!! Walk the fucking dog! And what’s even better, I bet you did!”
I assured him that he was wrong, but he seemed to be enjoying himself so much I didn’t press the point. At any rate, something clicked, and we returned to our old footing, or close enough that Aaron invited me over.
“Keep your expectations low,” he stated, “and you won’t be disappointed.”
Ironic that a dog should have been the source of our reconciliation, for Aaron now had one of his own, a yellow lab with a very large head. Eva he called her, and their “bunker” was a basement apartment below a loud Italian family, its windows overlooking (at ankle-level), on one side, a driveway, and, on the other, a pathetically well-groomed but tiny plot of grass with a plastic, child-sized cast of the Virgin Mary. She kept her back to us.
He was now blind, of course. A placard hung from Eva’s neck reading, IGNORE ME. I AM A WORKING GUIDE DOG. Those words ricocheted around in my head. They seemed such a surly and undignified thing for a dog—any dog, but this one in particular—to say.
He offered me a cup of tea: “It’ll only take a couple of hours. Now that you’re a free man, you have the time to spare.” Taking invisible umbrage at this sally, I made no offer to help as he ran both hands through the eccentrically stocked kitchen cabinet, knocking over boxes of sweet cereal and cans of black beans and dog food until he found the Lipton’s he was looking for, lifted out two tea bags, and then started to search for a pot, a kettle, anything in which water could be brought to a boil. Rice and pasta rained from their bags onto the counter. Aaron seemed to be injuring himself deliberately—releasing