The Lost Night (Page 28)

“Alex, I think the fact that neither of us has firm plans tonight is a sign from above.” I kept my voice light. “It’s shitty outside and God wants us to get together and eat, you know, caloric things.”

“ ‘Caloric things.’ You really paint a picture with words.” I could hear it, the crack as he relented. “Can we meet near Grand Central so I can catch the train straight from there?”

* * *

I beat him to the restaurant and sat flicking through his photos on Facebook. He was still dreamy; I’d always had a vague crush on him, but he was Edie’s and way out of my league. I’d felt lucky just to be friends with him, to sometimes be spotted in public in such handsome company. Most of the pictures were of him and his wife: on vacation, at a play, at a wedding.

He pushed open the door and moved like I remembered, solid and with an easy swagger. He perked up when he spotted me, and I stood from the dinky table to give him a hug. He smelled warm and autumnal, and for a moment, my only thought was that it was good to see him. Then I remembered everything I needed to ask him, the simmering spite toward Edie that had only come out when we were drunk and my Flip cam was rolling. For a moment I saw it like a scene from a horror movie: Edie in her undies turning around just in time to see Alex raise the gun. I gave my head a little shake and began exchanging pleasantries. This must be what it’s like to be a sociopath.

“I’m so glad you could be convinced to come out tonight,” I said. “It’s been way too long. How’s everything?”

“Yeah, this was definitely unexpected. I’m good.”

We caught up politely: Alex was still working for the same company, still happily married, now looking to buy a home in Tarrytown. The waiter appeared and Alex began ordering a glass of wine, but I convinced him to make it a bottle. I’ve found it’s not hard to hide the fact that I don’t drink a single sip of my “half.”

I flashed back to us as buddies, hanging out on a cold winter night, drinking cocoa with schnapps and playing Before and After, a stupid word game we made up that involved easing band names into unrelated portmanteaus. Radioheadphones. Ace of Base-jumping. Once he and I had almost died of laughter over increasingly elaborate plans to open Destiny’s Child’s Pose, a yoga studio that played early-naughts R&B.

“Well, I’m at Sir magazine,” I volunteered.

“It’s been a while now, right?”

“Five years!” I nodded, eyebrows high. “They just switched us to a new platform that makes more interviews and photos and original documents and stuff available to the reader, so it’s like figuring out the whole fact-checking ethos anew.”

“That’s great. That’s really great.” Now he did the deliberate head bob. “Always good when it’s dynamic.”

The wine appeared and Alex had to do the dog and pony show, swirling, sniffing, tasting, approving.

“You’re in Cobble Hill?” he asked.

“Fort Greene, and yep, also going on five years now! It’s a New York City miracle. I’ve got the nicest landlord, so I just haven’t seen a reason to leave. He owns this woo-woo place called Healing Hands Reiki on the ground floor and lives right above it, so I’m his only tenant.” Aggressive hairpin turn: “We’ve come a long way from Bushwick.”

“Yeah, the lofts were pretty shitty, huh? Weird to think about us living there.”

“I didn’t. I knew better.”

He chewed his bread, smiling. “That’s right. But we were only there, what? A little less than two years. We had some good times in that loft.”

“Hell, yeah, we did.”

“On track to be the best years of my life, weirdly. I still can’t believe—” His eyes popped up and the waiter leaned in to set down our food. Goddamn waiters and their impeccably bad timing. Alex picked up his fork and got quiet again.

How had Kevin put it, back when this all began? “Figure out what really went on that night.” Alex had answers, but getting them was going to take more work than I thought.

“Do you still play guitar at all?” I asked between bites.

He shrugged. “Not really. I used to play when I got home from work sometimes, but lately I’ve just been too tired.”

“You used to be really good,” I said lamely.

“A couple guys at work and I keep talking about starting a band together. Jam out like a bunch of old losers. Hard to actually make it happen, though.”

I poured him more wine and then looked back down at my noodles.

“Fleetwood Mac and Cheese,” I said.

“Oh my god.” He nodded his approval. “Well played, Bach. Okay. Um…Aimee Mann-agement funds.”

“Oh my god, we’re so old. You never would have come up with that back in the day.” We both cracked up, and just like that, ten years between us splintered apart.

“I have to tell you, seeing you and Sarah in the flesh in the span of a week is pretty surreal,” I said.

“Do we look old to you?”

“Well, now I realize how old I’ve gotten.”

Alex laughed. “You look the same! Do I really look old now?”

“Oh, sir, I think you dropped your fishing pole!” I mimed handing something back to him; he played along. “But no, none of us looks old. I guess it’s more that twenty-three seems absurdly young now. I’ve been looking at old photos and…god, we were babies. You know what I realized?”

“What’s that?”

“Remember Edie’s boyfriend, Greg? That older architect she dated right before you?”

“Sure.” He kept chewing, listening attentively. No particular ire toward the man she’d left for Alex.

“He was our age, like now, when he started dating Edie, who was twenty-three. Can you imagine?”

He considered. “I guess I have buddies who date girls that age. But yeah, seems a little…stunted. Like, what do they even have in common?”

“Apart from the unshakable belief that he’s a demigod?” I cracked, and he guffawed. “Edie had mentioned in an email that her mom liked that dude. Which, you’d think a mother would be suspicious of a grown man interested in her postgrad daughter.”

“That so?”

No, it was a blatant lie. I had no idea how Mrs. Iredale felt about Greg. But I nodded.

“Well, I can’t imagine her mom had anything nice to say about me.”

This again. “Why do you say that?”

He shook his head. “Never mind.”

“No, I’m curious! You said you didn’t like them.” It’s a long story, he’d said on the phone. And when I told him I had time: See, I kinda don’t.

“It’s just—we had a weird…incident.”

The waiter leaned in to refresh our water. Fuck.

“Why are we talking about this again?” Alex said in the ensuing silence.

“Alex, I want to tell you something.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“I know about Lloyd.”

His eyes widened and I held my breath. If my gamble was wrong and Lloyd wasn’t the paramour Alex had been referring to…

“What?”

“I actually knew him.”

“You did ?”

“Yeah, I met him the same night Edie did. Well, the same night you and Edie met for the first time officially.”

“In the city?”

“Yeah, we ended up hanging out on a rooftop on Fourteenth.”

He squinted at me. “You were there?”

Ouch. “I was indeed!”

“Huh.” He leaned back and looked around suspiciously. “In my head it was her old roommate.”

“Which one?”

“I forget her name. She had the nose.” He outlined a bump over his own face. What a nice descriptor for him to use.

“Well, it was me,” I continued, “and I remember you bros seeming pretty tight, so I was really surprised he’d do that to you.”

“Oh, we stopped hanging out long before he and Edie started hooking up.”

Lucky break that he hadn’t asked how I’d found out about the affair. Men’s brains really do work differently—without the real-time social mapping, perhaps, the 3-D blueprints of relational information. “Right, you guys had a falling-out. Did he start hooking up with Edie as, like, a revenge thing?”

He snorted. “Revenge? We weren’t on a soap opera.” He shrugged. “It was just some dumb elementary-school shit. He borrowed my nicest guitar and fucked it up and refused to fix it. He was also this brilliant deadbeat who was too high and coked up to actually accomplish anything. We got into a stupid fight and I told him so. I used to have some anger issues.”

More wine appeared and we both waited through its uncorking. Another lucky break: He was still a fast drinker.

“Anger issues?” I asked finally, spinning the ruby liquid around in my glass.

“Dude, let’s stop talking about this. As we already established, we were stupid twenty-three-year-olds.” He scrunched up his mouth. “Actually, I think I was twenty-four.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t matter.” I picked up my fork again. “How did you find out? About Edie and Lloyd?”