THE DAY THE DEAL WENT QUEER

I don’t like Allan as a rule. I work with him and I partner with him, I have dinners and lunches and, until recently, breakfasts with him. I go to client meetings with him and we compare notes on revisions and we get along just fine. But there’s always something just beneath his face, a kind of animosity towards the world and its inhabitants, a sense of self that’s thick and insulating, a dismissive and occasionally abusive intellectuality that borders on narcissism, that puts me off. It isn’t something that I see in his eyes or some kind of wisdom intuited from unconscious body language that signals his inner most feelings. It’s having listened to him independently proclaim the guilt of villains in the local newspaper without having any evidence against them, aside from the fact that they’re in police custody. It’s listening to the way he drowns out other opinions in group meetings, not because the other opinions are wrong, but because they are not his. His own ideas, you see, are invariably young, and thus must be protected from all possible predators, whether real or imagined.

Allan’s nice enough. Precisely nice enough. Just exactly nice enough, and no more. And he knows it. And he fills the gaps between his niceness to the outside world and the imagined slings and arrows it has arrayed against him with prejudgments and proclamations chiseled out of unformed opinion. There’s probably nothing terribly wrong about that, and he’s probably not unlike millions everywhere. But I work with him, and I have the same problem with his as I do with the government: I’m never sure when he might take aim at me and, with a prejudgment the size of downtown Las Vegas, find a reason why I should not be allowed to pursue the life, liberty, and happiness I spent twelve years worth of history lessons being told were my right and due.

Whether my wife knew my feelings or not before I informed her that we would be taking a celebratory dinner with Alan and his parents some months ago, I know not. It is difficult for me to say whether she was combing her hair with an air of disdain, applying her makeup with undue prejudice, selecting her dress with a heart full of venom, and picking out her shoes with pure and unmitigated sadism. I was not, in fact, in the room. I was already at Allan’s parents’ place.

Allan’s father is one of those men who seem to have done everything and nothing at once. A self made millionaire, he drives an old Mercedes diesel that trails clouds of black smoke; educated at Chapel Hill and proud of it, and remembers nothing of his college education; well connected in the financial community, and gave his children little or no guidance when it came time for them to choose their careers; an avid sports fan who hasn’t succeeded watching an entire sports even of any kind without falling asleep before its conclusion in over 15 years. Or at least that’s as much as I learned about him in the first 15 minutes of my association with him. His pride and joy is his estate, a huge house on a huge lot on a busy road, with no trees save the ones that delineate the property line—I learned that in the second 15 minutes. At that point, while pouring my second drink of the evening and his third, the tutelage ended, with Allan, Sr., demanding "So tell me about yourself."

I told him of my own poor education at the University here in Charlotte—Brilliant! he thought—asked how I like the firm—a good, level-headed assessment, he judged at my answer—spoke of my wife and our collective family, and spoke with pride of our dog and my car, during which he nodded and interjected "Sure, sure," as if to agree that the matters of the heart are the most important. Throughout the whole time, Allan sat by and let his father run the conversation, not offering comment, not interjecting opinion, just listening to his old man work the visitor. I decided then and there that I would like Allan’s father without ever having a very clear idea why I liked him, except maybe that he kept Allan shut for the occasional half-hour or so.

That had been six months previous, and my wife and I had since been to many, many dinners with Allan’s parents. Which is a large part of why I was there and my wife was still at home getting ready. The ritual above described was repeated, almost to a point, every time we went to Allan’s folks’ place. And although my wife likes Allan’s father as much as I do, the next part of the ritual was one she dreaded. For after Allan, Sr., does his duty by making his guests at ease, Allan’s mother, Margaret, enters, to put them on edge.

I like Margaret. She is what I have always thought of as the ideal Southern Woman: generous, opinionated, alert, and as genuine as cubic zirconia. The veneer of grace and culture is well applied, and comes on and off as if attached with velcro. She loves her husband, her children, her house, her country, and her society just exactly as much as she was supposed to. No more, no less. Which is fine by me. I can sure as hell think of worse things.

I don’t like the way she loves Allan. An only child should always be equipped with some sort of deformity that makes it a challenge to love them. A club foot, a bad smile, a mean streak, something, just so it’s not so easy to love the child, because the kind of love a mother has for her only child, if it comes too easy, can be a terrible and vile thing. Allan’s mother loves him the way snakes love mice. From the moment she enters the room she devours him, and the rest of the evening becomes a long, slow, process of watching Margaret slowly, lovingly, digest him.

This evening, as my wife pulled into traffic on Providence Road, travelling west against the last of the rush hour traffic, Allan’s mother took her first large bite of her evening meal. As the two Allans and I entered the kitchen from the living room, a chill came into the air, which shuddered with sudden tension. Or maybe I imagined that. Margaret came away from the roast she was preparing and, without a moment of hesitation, laid into Allen with lethal accuracy:

"So does this mean you’re finally getting your commissions for Howard Pyle’s bank building?"

She directed the question to Allen, but she was looking directly at me. Looking back on it, I think maybe she thought my answer would be more truthful than Allan’s. I looked at Allan, and Allan looked back at me. I felt fifteen. I felt like she had just asked if we had gotten our test grades in History. I blurted out the first thing that came into my head, which turned out to be "Huh?"

Allan said "I got the commission on the drawings moths ago, mom. We just got our payment for the construction administration."

"Oh. I see." She actually seemed disappointed. "Well, that’s good." Allan launched into a detailed explanation of construction administration that I tried my best not to follow. (I call it Con Admin. I also call construction management Con Management. Nobody ever seems to get either pun. Or at least they never admit it.) When Allan eventually was done explaining the schedule of payments to contractors that is used as proof that the work required to construct the building has all been accomplished and that, therefore, the building must now exist, I finally cut in to explain that the firm had received the fee for Con Admin, not us. We were just celebrating the construction of our first full-scale project.

Margaret said "Oh. I see" again, and this time it was less like she was disappointed. It was more like she’d just been told that Allan’s children would never be told there was a Santa Clause, so she’d never be able to slip an anonymous present under the tree for them. "I thought you were going to build your house after you got your commission?"

That didn’t sink in for quite a while. So I’m not going to tell you what it actually meant for another page or two.

By that time my wife had negotiated the left turn onto Sharon Amity and was cruising blissfully along the winding four-lane road, the setting sun painting the treetop canopies with its gentle light, as Margaret’s esophageal muscles compacted Allan as they worked him inch by inch along her digestive canal. By this time, the topic had turned to real estate at Lake Norman.

Allan, Sr., made his money in real estate, and, although he was retired by now, still made a lot of money in real estate. The market at that point was such that it was virtually impossible to deal in real estate and not make a lot of money. While there were plenty of people looking for land to buy or lease in order to build things, there were also a lot of people who would pay people money to assure that nothing whatsoever would get built anywhere near them. So it was natural for them to be talking about the price of a quarter acre lot off Highway 21 versus a fifth acre lot fronting the lake. Especially if Allan were to be looking at building a house sometime soon. By that time, my wife was pulling up in the driveway. Margaret had just finished reeling off a list of people they new who had bought houses at the lake and how much they had paid and how young they’d been at the time when the doorbell rang. I nearly got up to answer the door myself. Allan, Sr., rose to answer it instead, so I was forced to sit there watching, wondering if asphyxiation would set in before the digestive juices began to disintegrate the prey.

I’ve wasted enough time already. Therefore I have concluded it would be wrong of me to launch into a full-fledged description of the dinner party that followed. Thus, I now intend to present the dinner party in outline form:

INTRODUCTION
Allan’s father flirts with my wife
My wife responds coyly

THE COCKTAILS
My wife has a gin and tonic
Allan’s father has a martini
I have a martini
My wife discreetly fails to drink her gin and tonic

DINNER
Allan thusly becomes the only person who fails to completely finish a complete serving of London broil with crisp green beans and scalloped potatoes in some kind of cream sauce I kept telling my wife to get the recipe for sotto voce until I got tired of being kicked in the ankle
I have four glasses of wine
Allan’s father has five

AFTER DINNER
Allan’s father talks, for the first time since I’ve known him, solely about real estate.
Allen sits nearby, looking like somebody just stole all his Easter candy
Allan’s mother bores my wife senseless talking about home decorating

THE GREAT ESCAPE
My wife, brilliant though she is, can’t really manage "have to get back, big day tomorrow"
Allan, to my amazement, manages some fiction about having a golf game in the morning
The way is cleared, the guards subdued, and the appropriate bribes dispensed at the border

The last thing Allan said, although he didn’t say it directly to me, was "fucking God." I didn’t ask him what he meant by that.

My wife and I climbed into her car and started home. About the time we passed out of the driveway, I took off my glasses, put a hand over my eyes, and echoed Allan’s sentiment. "What’s wrong," my wife asked, "too many drinks?"

"Yes," I said, "but only collaterally."

"What’s wrong, honey?" She placed a triangular hand on my forehead, trying to gauge my internal temperature when she should have been watching the road, resulting in a near-head-on collision with an oncoming truck that bounced us off the side of the road into an embankment and killed us both.

Sorry. I always wanted to do that. My wife put her hand on my forehead, with the result that, a second later, she had to swerve back away from the shoulder of the road. "I’m fine," I said, "watch the road. Allan’s mother wants him to buy a house."

"Oh," said my wife.

A few moments later, she said "Oh," in a slightly troubled voice, her brow furrowed.

A few moments later, she said "Oh, no!" in a voice full of shock and alarm, her eyes as wide as potatoes. She had, after all, seen Allan and his mother interact before. "Allan’s mother devours him," I had said late in the evening after she first met Allan and his mother. "Mmm," she had replied, clearly giving the indication that she had understood my vast philosophical insight into their relationship and tacitly approved my assessment of the situation.

Nothing much happened for the next few weeks, and, in fact, I don’t think I saw Allan twice in the time between leaving his parent’s house and the day he came into my office and said "Ask me how I am! Quick! Ask me how I am!"

I looked up, bemused, and said "Hi Allan, how are you?"

His face fell, and he filled it with as blank a look as he could manage. "Half a million dollars in debt."

The first visit to Allan’s house was on the occasion of the housewarming party the office threw for him. I rode with Frank (my Metro was in the shop, having turned out not to be so easy to work on that an average moron with no real automotive training other than 10 years experience tinkering with a Karman Ghia couldn’t break something that had to be replaced by a skilled technician), in the bright orange Austin Healy he had bought about a month before Alan traded in his Sebring for a Beemer. We pulled off the highway onto a road that was barely one lane wide and just nominally paved. Soon the paving ceased, and the road widened to a two lane gravel road not old enough for ruts. Everybody but Frank slowed down. I felt, rather than saw, a change come over his face as he felt the tires bite into the gravel, and he worked the clutch and the accelerator and spun us around the few turns in the road in a magnificent display of sophomoric driving. Frank came within an ace of Joyce’s Volvo’s bumper, pulled around her, and sped on, the road to himself. Thirty yards later, we saw the house.

The lot, one of three on a hilltop overlooking the lake, had been clear-cut, so that the house stood out starkly against the backdrop of the lake and the forests on the opposite shore. At first glance the land did a vanishing act behind the house, so that the vista from the road was undisturbed; on closer inspection, the slope down to the lake was rather gentle. The house itself, which dated to the late sixties, was built in-grade, which is architect talk for On A Hill, so that the front of the house had one story while the back of the house had three. Unconsciously, my first thought was "Allan’s mother picked a good house." I shunned the idea once I became aware of it. I thought I was being unfair.

The location was Mountain Island Lake, which is no where near the mountains, contains an isthmus but no islands, and is only a lake because the county dammed the Catawba River at the head of the valley some years back. The lake itself was intended as a water supply reservoir, but, as all things do, Mountain Island Lake had uses beyond the intended. It has become, as one of our land developers tends to say, a Micro Destination-- the lake people go to when they can’t hack the drive to Lake Norman (45 minutes further). I believe I’m beginning to sound bitter. Am I sounding bitter? I’m not, really. It’s just that, somehow, Mountain Island Lake seems like cheating.

The party itself was a passable feast. We all of us reveled in the rediscovery of which members of the staff could and could not cook, which felt the splendour of occasion warranted purchases from the upscale grocery chains and which rated all occurrences in life as equal to a bag of corn chips. Frank and I ran out for beer three times, mainly so that Frank could drive the Austin Healy on the gravel road again. A few of the folks had what was probably one too many beers, but by the time mid-afternoon had rolled around people started trickling away. Frank and I stayed longer, chatting a bit with Allan on the upper deck and watching the sun creep closer to the lake. Unfortunately, Allan isn’t much of a conversationalist, and, subsequently, we didn’t stay long enough to watch the sun set.

On the way back Frank talked about designing his dream house until I wanted to kick him in the shins. You can’t do that in an Austin Healy, so I didn’t. He made some good points, but most of it was the same warmed over Frank Lloyd Wright crapola I studied in college.

Over the next week, Allan was hard pressed t talk about anything but his house. Not the stuff I had expected, like how great the view was at dawn or how lovely the sunsets over the water were, but about how many different roads there were from the lake to the city, what a wise decision it was to avoid the Interstate, how early (6:00 AM) he had to get up in order to be in on time, and, usually around 8:25, where the worst traffic in North Mecklenburg was that day. A couple of times during the week, he invited me out to "tip a couple of pints," as about everybody else in Charlotte was saying at the time. Along around Thursday, I got curious enough to take him up on it. I thought maybe he was up to something, maybe getting ready to ask a favor, or maybe trying to play Best Friends again. So, at a quarter after five, he piled into his Sebring and I tumbled behind the wheel of my Metro (out of the shop; who knew the thing had computer chips in it?), and I followed him out to a restaurant at the north end of the county. It turned out to be a chain restaurant parading as a brew-pub. There’s one just like it in Atlanta. The décor suggested something between a blue collar bar in south Pittsburgh and tavern in Devonshire; it was peopled with office workers, most in business casual, a few with wilting ties dangling from undone collars or, for a few of the women in the place, the regimented fashion of the liberated world. Allan and I propped at the bar long enough to get the barkeep to draw us each a pint (Lakewater Ale for Allan, which I thought sounded like a terrible idea, and Olde Towne Stout for me, which was the only title on the board that didn’t give me an outright urge to chuckle), and then took our libations out onto the deck and sipped them while staring out into the purpling twilight and listening to the whisper of traffic on I-77.

I lit a cigarette and started playing a game with myself, trying to decide which of the buildings around me (offices, 16 screen movie theater, Wal-Mart, shops) had been the "development" property, and which had been the "outparcels," properties chopped into the landscape on the presupposition that, as the new developments grew and thrived, the rest of the properties would begin to be seen as wise choices for business or retail establishments. It was a pointless exercise. I came to the conclusion that, at least in this development, I couldn’t tell one from the other. I began to chuckle to myself. "If you build it, they will come." It had become a kind of in gag among architects, but it had stopped being funny the second the people who do marketing found out how true it was and started using it to sell development people. It got even less funny when the development people picked up on it and started using it to sell bank people and potential tenants.

I thought about sharing this with Allan, but I knew he wouldn't want to hear it. After a few moments of staring out into the dusk, Allan started talking. It turned out he had a problem with the medical office project he was working on, mainly trouble with the clients. How are you supposed to explain to a bunch of doctors who all want windows in their offices why 12 had windows and 2 didn't, and it would have helped if he had known to begin with that all the interior corridors were to be blind, since no one wants to undress in public, for Christ's sake. But the partner who had brought the clients on board wasn't ever around; in fact, had sloughed this project off on Allan so he could go out chasing more business, and by the time he had showed back up Allan had re-done all the floor plans, but Karl wouldn't let him bill the client for the re-done layout, said it was Allen's fault for not having consulted with him before he jumped into design; okay, so he had brought two offices out and made the corridors blind, not a big deal, mainly just autocad crap anyway, he could do it in his sleep. After a second pint, which I had concluded was actually tapped into a 12-ounce glass, I declined Allan's suggestion of grabbing a sandwich-- no, thanks, gotta get back, don't know what the wife has planned. I climbed into the Metro and wheeled back into the city, reflecting, as I zipped south past the traffic struggling its way northward, that it had been built, and they had come. Forty minutes later I walked into an empty house, my wife at the PTA meeting I knew she was going to. I made a sandwich in the kitchen and ate it over the sink, throwing scraps to the dog the way I had told my wife we should never do, and wondered quietly why Allan had spent the entire evening talking, for the first time in two weeks, about business.

Allan called us the next day to invite us out to his house. My wife took the call. "Come on out," Allan said, "it’s a beautiful day at the lake! Unless you had other plans."

"No, no," my wife said, "just puttering around, reading the paper, the usual. How do we get out there?"

"Your husband ought to know the way. He was just out here yesterday."

An hour later, having gotten us completely lost, I recognized the road that leads to Allan’s house completely by accident. As we pulled up the gravel road my wife, ever the good spirit, remarked that she was glad she hadn’t said something like "We’ll be there in an hour." It was about that time that the house on the lake really began to make sense.

We saw Diane.

Allan had mentioned her from time to time, as someone he went out to dinner with or caught a weekend movie with, but nothing he had ever said to me indicated there was anything serious between them. So naturally the first conclusion I came to was that Diane had moved into Allan’s new house with him.

She greeted us well, and led us into the house. Along the way we found out that she was a writer for the paper (missed the party Saturday because she had a story assignment to work on), that she went to college at NC State (knows Allan from college), and that she had, in fact, moved in (she didn’t have to say anything at all). We found Allan sitting on the upper deck, looking out over the lake like he owned it. Or at least like he wanted to make us think he might.

He rose and shook my hand (later that night I would remark that Allan had shaken hands with me perhaps twice before then), offered a drink (I accepted), and informed us that dinner would be whenever we got hungry. He kissed my wife (once before that I could think of, never that my wife could), offered her a drink (yes), and told us to sit and admire the view while he brought us our libations. Diane sat with us, and she made small talk with my wife while I stared out at the lake, trying to give the impression that I was admiring the view.

Some years back my father and I took a trip canoeing on a man made lake up in the mountains, a couple of hours or so west of Charlotte. The map we used to navigate the lake documented buildings and houses that lay beneath the surface, absurdly naming the houses (Wilbur Jones House) after the person the government had bought it from so that they could bury it beneath 30 or 40 yards of water, and indicating the denomination of the submerged church’s former congregation ("I doubt they have much of a choir," my dad said, "but I’ll bet the sermons are weighty"). I can’t help it. Man made lakes, in my humble opinion, are cheating.

Allan returned with our drinks, a gin and tonic for me and a glass of cabernet for my wife (she lifted an eyebrow—good stuff). We gazed out at the lake and chatted about water traffic and whether it was somehow inauthentic to sail a yacht on a man made lake (I brought the subject up). After a time, in the strange social alchemy which has existed for all time, Allan took me off to see the rest of the house while my wife and Diane talked, as Diane put it, with a wholly inappropriate amount to enthusiasm, "girl talk."

The resulting tour yielded a monologue from Allan, the contents of which are here recorded in verbatim. I swear it.

"This is the Great Room, obviously. The bar is original to the house, but the paneling was put in later, you can tell that from the joints. See how this matches, you can just see where the original wall is beneath the joint. I think the floors are newer, too, but I can’t prove it. Fireplace works, chimney needs to be swept; having that done in a few weeks. Unfortunately, I’ll end up having to buy firewood, but I think I know a fellow who’ll sell it to me cheap, since he’s making a bonus on top of what he’s getting for clearing lots up the road. Back here is the master bedroom [he indicated it, but, with due respect, did not enter], which has windows front, side and back onto the lake, which I liked a lot. [Down a set of stairs, for which I supplied "These are the stairs!"] This is the rec room, or will be if I decide to put a wreck in it. Ha ha ha! So far I’ve got a dartboard, which came with the place. I’m actually thinking of bringing a Ping-Pong table down here. Yeah, I thought of that, but even though the structure could handle the weight, I don’t relish the idea of handling the weight myself, so for the time being, at least, no pool table for me. And over here, guess what? Another bar! Get the idea the people who built this place liked to entertain a lot? At this end there are two guest rooms, but, as you can tell, this room is pretty much all there is to this floor, which I LOVE. [Down another set of stairs, for which I supplied "More stairs!"] Okay! Not much down here, mainly just storage space, water heater, furnace, but I think after a while I might decide to finish some of it out. And here [out a door at the bottom of the house], the garden. The paths were done in brick, but I think I might do something in flagstones or perhaps slate. After a bit of landscaping, I’ll see if Diane wants to try her hand at gardening. And if she doesn’t, I’ll do it myself! Ha, ha. I seriously doubt it will come to that, though. She loves gardening. [A moment while we look out at the lake, late afternoon sun slanting down on the water, the faraway burr of a Ski Do somehow sounding pleasant and peaceful, probably because it was faraway, and a wind that felt the way only winds that come off the water feel.] Well, I suppose we ought to go see what the women are up to. You know what I like about this place? It looks bigger than it is. I mean, clearly, there’s plenty of room, but you’d look at it and think there’d be a lot of rooms, a lot of frills, but there aren’t. It’s a good, basic house, with big enough rooms and enough rooms, workable and not overworks. Screw all that Frank Lloyd Wright bullshit. This is the way houses should be built."

Or something like that. Except that last bit about Frank Lloyd Wright. That last bit is a lie. I just tossed it in there for balance.

By the time we got back upstairs, Diane and my wife had retreated to the kitchen (one will note that Allan had omitted it from his tour) for the purposes of readying comestibles for consumption. That is to say, supper was in the making. At Diane’s request, we began making ourselves useful, carrying plates and food out to the table on the upper deck, lighting insect repelling candles, turning on lights, getting the gas grill lit and heating. Allan pointed me to his stereo setup and I ruffled through a variety of CD selections, none of them seeming to offer anything, until I finally stumbled across a Miles Davis (from Allan’s jazz phase), a Bartok to follow that with, and a DeBussey I thought would end nicely.

Supper turned out to be grilled chicken that had been soaking in something involving lemon, dill, and balsamic vinegar all day. The three of us, Diane, my wife and myself, sat back and sipped wine while Allan alternately joined the conversation, largely about the wretched state of literature in the late 20th Century, and turned the chicken on the grille. By the time the sun had come down into a soft red puddle before us, the table was piled with steaming, fragrant meat, and dinner was served.

I looked up at my wife. We like our house. Is that it? No. Something else. My wife and I are not who we are because we like our house.

I didn’t get it and I wasn’t going to get it, and instinct said quit thinking things to death and eat this chicken. Yum. Much better.

After dinner the Bartok kicked in, for which Diane gave me a wink and a nod. A brief conversation of single words between myself and my wife reached the conclusion that I would accept the scotch and cigar Allan had offered, and she would drive home. As he went to get the indicated materials, I noticed, as I hadn’t before, the bookshelves behind the bar. I followed him into the house. Thinking I had followed to help, he said "No, no, that’s okay, I can get it." I explained that I wanted to take a look at his book collection, to which he shrugged "Help yourself."

They were all architecture books, of course, and I didn’t know most of them. The few I did recognize were either drafting books or large pictorials of Gothic or Bauhaus or mid-1920’s American Art Deco architecture. Allan handed me a glass with a good measure of Scotch in it and a cigar he had trimmed for me. The look in his eye was pleasure, pleasure mixed with. . with . . .

Strength. That was it. Allan the homeowner. No, better yet: Allan the Master of the House. And that was it. That was precisely it.

See, I had never looked at Allan and seen anything more than an overgrown frat boy. Which is unfair, but that’s how I felt. Now, I think I felt something for him. I could identify with him. I knew what it was like to feel that. When my wife and I were on our uppers, my first year out of school, when I was working at a large architecture firm and making a little under 15 thousand dollars a year, before she could even think of getting a teaching job, I had days when I would drag around like I knew the next thing I would do would queer the deal, I’d get fired, a bus would hit me, I’d come down with some dread disease and need some radical medical procedure God himself couldn’t afford, even on his income. Something was going to happen, and then I’d be doomed, and I’d take my poor sweet wife down with me. Some days I knew I was going to screw up, and the jig would be up, and they’d catch me.

It never happened. I sweated it out a few times, had an assignment at work that didn’t go 100% according to plan and wasted a lot of mental energy figuring out who I was going to blame for the screw up when the shit hit the fan, spent a sleepless night figuring out how I would explain to the principles of the firm, after they called me on the carpet, precisely why there was one fewer client today than there had been yesterday. I was smooth as silk on the surface, but I was sure as hell Henny Penny inside: the sky was falling, and I doubt if anyone besides my wife ever knew it.

But it never happened. And I don’t think that occurred to me until about the time we bought our house. It was a sense of relief compiled from a half a million other things. Certainly it was different for Allan, and probably it wasn’t a sense that the sky was no longer falling. But probably it was the same basic thing. He seemed confident without being cocky, I think for the first time since I’ve known him.

Back out on the deck, I gave my wife seven or eight significant glances, almost all of which she missed. One of the ones she caught made her think I was getting drunk. Another seemed to convey that I had a bad case of gas. Finally, catching her eye while Diane asked Allan a question, I tried to give her a glance that conveyed what I had discovered about Allan. She gave me a look back that said she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, and would I please stop looking at her like a lunatic. I gave up. There was always the ride home. I could always gloat over my superior powers of observation on the ride home.

There was more conversation, which I drifted in and out of while I tried to think about that change in life that makes us feel as if we’ve finally become secure grownups, and whether I should feel lucky or common, whether this happens to everyone, or whether I was, perhaps, one of the blessed.

Allan fetched us each another Scotch after a time, as the conversation turned to decorating. My wife was extolling the virtues of hardwood floors by the time Allan returned with our drinks. Allan walked in just as Diane was saying ". . . but we’re carpeting the floors up here, except for the master bedroom."

Allan looked at her as if she’d just confessed to the Jack The Riper Murders. Diane looked at him, registered his surprise with bland acknowledgement, and said, "You remember, we discussed it, and you agreed that carpet was the thing to do.

Allan said something that might have been "Yeah," or might have been "Oh, that’s right," or might have been "I’ll kill you, you soulless whore." I didn’t hear it. I was transfixed, watching Diane’s lower jaw unhinge.

"She ate him," I said later, in the car, on the way home.

"Yes, dear," my wife replied.

"She ate him," I said again, just for clarity.

"Yes, dear," my wife replied.

It wasn't so much that Allan had married a woman who, like his mother, would reduce his significance in the universe to the morsel that sustains her. It was more that I had started to like Allan, for the first time I could remember. Maybe I was fantasizing over the possibility that my wife and I might finally have something resembling a social life. I ran these possibilities, first one then the other, past my wife.

"We have a social life," my wife surmised. "We just don't like the people with whom we're social."

"That's not specifically true. But I suppose it's close enough."

"Why can't you like Allan? Because of Diane?"

I thought about it, and it didn't make any sense. I wanted to say it's not a question of can't, just a matter of don't; not like I was making a choice, but simply reacting to a fact. But I knew that wasn't true. In the end I said "I don't know," and left it at that.

And then he was gone.

It took a week or two for it to sink in. No one said much of anything at first, although everyone seemed to know that for the past month Allan had been on the outs with one of the partners. This served as yet another confirmation of the fact that I am not everyone. The scuttlebutt was that he had tried to shrug off the blame when the doctors accused him of screwing up their office plans, and the partner had made it clear that Allan was expected to cover the partner's ass, either by staying in the firm and taking his lumps or by bailing out and tasking the heat in absentia. I didn't see much of him for most of a month, for no real reason that I could testify to, and then suddenly I didn't see him at all. It was a Thursday when Allan left the firm; it was a Wednesday two weeks later when I passed by his office and thought to myself that Allan had left a pencil behind.

He bounced. A month or so later someone had heard somewhere that Allan was working at another firm, a larger one, here in town, and we all assumed he had signed on at a higher rate of pay for a more responsible position. A month isn't a bad amount of time in our business. Not long after that someone heard that Allan was doing Business Development at his new firm. Jane, the construction reporter, confirmed that for me later in the year, when I asked her to call Allan's new firm and ask what he was up to.

I haven't spoken to Allan since he left, not out of spite or envy or anything, and also not because I didn't have to. I didn't do anything to out and out avoid him, but I would have had the situation arisen. I don't have a real reason for it. Mainly, I think, I didn't want to confront the truth myself.

The deal had gone queer, the luck had run out, and Allan likely didn't even blink. He didn't feel despair or angst, didn't lie awake nights wondering what, if anything, was next. He wasn't spending any time languishing in his own personal hell, and when the end of the month came if he needed he would borrow money from his father, and he calmly called around and networked and schmoozed and sold himself like he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. He most likely blamed his leaving the firm on the lack of vision of the partner he had tangled with, and disguised the fact that he had eventually been forced out because he had pissed off a client, a cardinal sin in our business. He didn't do what I would have done, which is to blame the whole thing on myself and fall apart and rail against the universe and, finally, inevitable, get it together, put on my game face, and go out and find a firm that needed an architect so bad they were bleeding of it.

And so to Hell with him.

James MacFarlane Williams