Careful to make it in no way resemble an Approach, I came over to the man and sat on the stool beside him, my feet dangling.
“Look, I’m not a homosexual either,” I found myself saying, though thank God quietly. “In fact I too am here as a… rememberer and not a patron. But I think if one comes to a place like this, for whatever reason, it behooves one not to be overtly rude to the people for whom coming here is… entirely appropriate.” My ice snapped suddenly in my drink.
The man looked at me in the mirror, chewing. We waited while his mouth cleared of peanuts. “I got nothing against homosexuals,” he said. “They can go around being homosexuals amongst themselves all they want, far as I’m concerned. It’s just when it’s my own personal ass that they start sniffin’ after and checkin’ out, I find my tolerance level really plummets, for some reason.” He took some beer. “As for coming into this place, I was coming into this place when these old boys were all out kneeling in alleys in the rain.” He gestured slightly through the mirror at the Approacher and his friends. “This is more my place than theirs. I used to spend hours here, when it was a real bar. I used to talk to the whores here. They were real nice. I got educated here. My house used to come down here, en-fucking-masse, on Wednesday nights.”
“Wednesdays?” I asked. Wednesdays. “House as in… fraternity house?”
His green eyes were on mine in the mirror. I thought I could see something, in those eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“Not… Amherst College fraternity house.”
“Yeah, I went to Amherst,” he said.
“Not… Psi Phi fraternity at Amherst,” I said.
He swiveled on his stool to face me. “Yeah.” I felt the jealous stares of the “Bob Newhart” crowd.
“My Lord,” I said. “Myself as well. Psi Phi. Class of ‘69.”
The man grinned widely. “ ‘83 here,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed; he held out his hand, each finger pointing in a different direction. Testing me, I knew. After only the briefest hesitation, I joined him in the Psi Phi handshake. I had not done it in so, so long. My throat ached a little bit. I found my arm tingling. “Quaaaango!” we yelled in unison at the end, and grabbed each other’s wrists, and tapped elbows. I felt eyes.
“Sheeit.”
“Heavens.”
I held out my hand in the conventional way. “I am Richard Vigorous of Cleveland, Ohio.”
The man took it. “Andrew Sealander Lang,” he said, “of Nugget Bluff, which is to say really Dallas, Texas, and lately of Scarsdale, New York.”
“Scarsdale, Andrew?” I said. “I lived in Scarsdale, myself, for a good while. Mostly in the seventies.”
“But you moved,” Andrew Lang said, smiling. “I can understand, completely and entirely. Yes.”
What am I to say, retrospectively, here? Perhaps that I felt myself in the presence of a kinsman. Not simply a fraternity brother: I had been a completely marginal Psi Phi, and had actually moved out of the place in some haste in the middle of my sophomore year, when the House upperclassmen cut our stairs off halfway and fashioned a crude diving board and cut open the House’s living-room floor and filled the basement with beer and called the entire creation a swimming pool, into which it was dictated that all sophomores were to be required to dive and then drink themselves to safety. I was marginal. And I sensed in Lang a really hard-core Psi Phi: he had had at least ten beers, was entering into negotiations for the eleventh, and didn’t seem the slightest bit tipsy; nor, even more important, had he been to the restroom once since I arrived. This was collegiate manhood as I had come to know it.
No, but still I felt affinities, elective or otherwise. I sensed somehow in Lang another inside outsider, another lonely alumnus here at an alumniless time. Surrounded by insiders, now: children, swaggering and belonging, with their complicated eyes. Lang’s eyes, eyes the color of plants, were not complicated. I looked at them in the mirror. They were like my eyes. They were the eyes of a man gone back to the house where he grew up, to watch new children play in his yard, a new Rawlings Everbounce pass through a new basketball hoop over his garage, a new dog diddle on his mother’s rhododendrons. Sad, sad. Perhaps it was only the whiskey, and the beer, but I sensed sadness in Lang. His bar was my college. They were the same. And we simply no longer belonged, now.
“Why are you in town?” I asked Lang. “Is ‘83 having some function?”
“Naw,” said the Texan. “ ‘83 never has functions. I just felt like I had to… to get the heck out of Scarsdale. Just get out for a while. Plus I really like it up here in the fall. ’Course it’s not really fall yet. Too goddamned hot.”
“Still, though.”
“Right. Exactly. Now but I bet you didn’t come all the way out here from Ohio just to get out, though, right?”
“No, you’re right.” I shook my head. I asked the now explicitly hostile bartender for another drink. The bartender glared at Lang. Lang ignored him. “No,” I said, “my fiancée is here visiting her brother, ‘93, and I just came along on a bit of a lark. I hadn’t even been back before.”
Lang stared into the mirror. “Naw, I haven’t been back much either. ‘Course I only been out a few years. And I’ve come back for a couple Homecomings. Those kick ass.”
“I remember they were fun.”
“You bet.”
“Are you married, in Scarsdale?” I asked. I must here confess that I asked the question for an admittedly immature and selfish reason. I instinctively and involuntarily regard all other men as potential threats to my relationship with Lenore. One more married man was one fewer member of the great threat-set.
“Yeah, I’m married.” Lang looked at his reflection in the mirror.
I giggled sympathetically.
“Is the wife up with you?” I asked.
“No she is not,” said Lang. He paused to belch. “The wife…,” he looked at his watch, “… the wife is at this second indubitably out in the back yard, on the lawn chair, with a martini and a Cosmopolitan, reinforcin’ the old tan.”
“I see,” I said.
Lang looked at me. “I really don’t know why the hell I came up here, to tell the truth. I just… felt like I needed to come home, somehow.” He drummed his knuckle on the bar.
“Yes, yes.” I almost clutched at his arm. “I understand completely. Trying to come back inside…”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. What do you do, Andrew? May I call you Andrew?”
“Sure you can, Dick,” he said. He turned back toward me, and there was peanut-smell. His eyes went dull. “Right now I’m in accounting. My wife’s Daddy’s an accountant and all, and so I do some work for him. I mostly fuck off, though. I’m gonna quit. I think I in effect quit today, by not showing up.” He gulped beer and wiped his lip, looking faraway. “When I got out of school, I worked overseas for a while, for my Daddy. My Daddy owns this company, in Texas, and I worked for them overseas, for a couple years. That was the balls.”
“But then you got married.”
“Yup.” Peanuts. “You married, Dick? That’s right, you said you’re engaged. ”
“I… I am engaged. To a wonderful, wonderful girl.” He was married, after all. “I was married before. I got divorced.”
“And engaged again now. Whooee. A glutton for punishment, Dick.”
“Please call me Rick,” I said. “My friends call me Rick. And an entirely different situation, this time, fortunately.” I felt a bit uncomfortable. Lenore and I were, after all, not explicitly engaged, although it was only a matter of waiting for the combination of the right moment and sufficient saliva.